Understanding and choosing a distribution

Linux, as hinted at in the preceding section, is fragmented. There's no better way to describe this, due to the sheer number of different distributions you can download from a multitude of different vendors. Some of these vendors are for-profit, offering support contracts and SLAs with your purchase of their OS, and some are entirely voluntary, manned by one person in their garage.

There are literally hundreds of distributions to choose from, and each has their advocate-army to tell you why theirs is "the one true distribution" and "there's really no reason to go shopping around for a different one."

The truth of the matter is that most businesses use the Linux distribution they do because it was:

• The first one that popped up when the owner Googled free OS
• The one the first IT Administrator liked
• The one that offers a contract they can invoke when something breaks

Going through each distribution that's around at the moment would be futile, as they're being created or abandoned on an almost weekly basis. Instead, I'm going to run through a popular selection (in the server space, rather than the desktop), explain some key differences, and then talk about which I'll be using for the rest of this book.

Don't be deterred if the distribution your business uses isn't one we talk about here – most of the tooling is consistent across distributions, and where it differs, documentation exists to help you out.