LXer: How Many Linux Distros Are On the Top Ten?

LXer · 09-03-2014, 04:51 PM

Published at LXer:

Most distros are based on other distros, basically making them modifications of their parent distros. In most important ways, these child distros behave like their parent distros. They mostly use the same package management and packages can usually be easily installed from the parent distros repository. Configuration is also usually the same, or nearly so, among these derivatives.

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metaschima · 09-03-2014, 05:42 PM

Quote:

This leaves us with only three distros (Mageia, Arch and openSUSE) that stand alone with no obvious relationship with any of the other distros on the list (although Mageia began as a fork of Mandriva which originally was a fork of the old Red Hat desktop).

OpenSuse is derived from Slackware, which is derived from SLS. Arch is standalone, which the article is correct about. Mageia is derived from Madriva, formery Madrake, which is derived from Red Hat, which the article is also correct about.

I guess people just don't know about or conveniently forget about Slackware.
http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/u...9/gldt1209.png

evo2 · 09-03-2014, 05:50 PM

Hi,

I think it is useful to differentiate between "derived" and "forked". For example Ubuntu is derived from Debian since for each release Ubuntu pulls updated packages from the Debian repos, but Mandrake was a fork of Red Hat since the code bases diverged.

Evo2.

metaschima · 09-03-2014, 09:14 PM

Well, technically CentOS is just a clone of RHEL.

jefro · 09-03-2014, 09:53 PM

Yet they all share a common kernel in most respects so there is only one linux in the top ten.