Linux Distro Types Explained: Originals, Derivatives, Flavors

linuxiac ^ | 28 December 2021 | Bobby Borisov

[Terry L Smith]

one machine store bought windows no cd drive.
one machine bought refurbished windows no disc

[Dalberg-Acton]

Then use a disk imaging program and save the image to your removable drive. I use Clonezilla, but there are other utilities you might prefer.

[Paal Gulli]

There are roughly 400 actively-maintained Linuxes, plus another 200-ish that have been abandoned but that stalwarts still use (and that ignores all the Android derivatives), so figuring out all the relationships is only slightly less challenging than keeping track of the constantly expanding "family tree" of subatomic particles being discovered by CERN.

They left out Linux Mint, which is a fork of Ubuntu.

[daniel1212]

"ok thank you on the nfts, now ... the hard drive, completely repartition or not?"

If you want to experiment with Linux and have a desktop that you know how to open up, I think the easiest way is to buy a 256GB SSD (about $25), unplug all other drives and install Linux on that, letting it take the whole of it, or put another Linux with it. Then plug in your other drive(s) and whenever you want to boot into Linux just keep tapping the key (F12 maybe) just after you reboot that your mobo lists for bringing up the boot menu for the drives, and choose the Linux drive.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Fedora at home. Ubuntu on the work laptop, RHEL on the work cloud “desktop” at the end of the day it’s all pretty much the same to me cept for the package manager and the newness/oldness of the software and how much is available in the repos. Most of what I need I can build from source - although I did get stumped last night trying to get something to build.

[ShadowAce]

Most of what I need I can build from source - although I did get stumped last night trying to get something to build.

Yeah--I'll occasionally spin up a VM and try to get LFS installed. I've never approached it seriously, and have always seemed to run into a package that just will not install, so I move on to something else.

One of these days, it'll work....