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Comparison of Linux distributions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Technical variations of Linux distributions include support for different hardware devices and systems or software package configurations. Organizational differences may be motivated by historical reasons. Other criteria include security, including how quickly security upgrades are available; ease of package management; and number of packages available.

These tables compare notable distribution's latest stable release on wide-ranging objective criteria. It does not cover each operating system's subjective merits, branches marked as unstable or beta, nor compare Linux distributions with other operating systems.

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General

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The table below shows general information about the distributions: founder or producer, maintainer, release date, the latest version, etc.

Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation[1] are marked 100% Free under the System distribution commitment column.

More information Distribution, Founder ...
  1. Debian releases are officially supported for 1 year after the subsequent release, with releases being approximately 2 years apart. The Debian LTS Project provides community based support extending the complete support period to 5 years.
  2. Default ISOs included non-free software
  3. Security updates are released every six weeks.
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Technical

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The table below shows the default file system, but many Linux distributions support some or all of ext2, ext3, ext4, Btrfs, ReiserFS, Reiser4, JFS, XFS, GFS2, OCFS2, and NILFS. It is possible to install Linux onto most of these file systems. The ext file systems, namely ext2, ext3, and ext4 are based on the original Linux file system.

File systems have been developed by companies to meet their specific needs, by hobbyists, or adapted from Unix, Microsoft Windows, and other operating systems. Linux has full support for XFS and JFS, FAT (the DOS file system), and HFS, the main file system for the Macintosh. Support for Microsoft Windows NT's NTFS file system has been developed and is now comparable with other native Unix file systems. CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs' ISO 9660 and Universal Disk Format (UDF) are supported.

Unlike other operating systems, Linux and Unix allow any file system regardless of the medium it is stored on, whether that medium is a magnetic disk, an optical disk (CD, DVD, etc.), a USB flash memory key, or even contained within a file located on another file system. Similarly, many C compilers (mainly GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)), init systems (mainly sysvinit), desktop environments and window managers are widely supported.

More information Distribution, Default Linux kernel ...
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Instruction set architecture support

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Linux kernel portability to instruction set architectures other than x86, was an early feature added to the kernel.

More information Distribution, x86 ...
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Package management and installation

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Information on features in the distributions. Package numbers are only approximate. Some distributions like Debian tend to separate tools into different packages – usually stable release, development release, documentation and debug. Also counting the source package number varies. For debian and rpm based entries it is just the base to produce binary packages, so the total number of packages is the number of binary packages. For Arch based entries, it is additional.

More information Distribution, Free software repositories ...
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Live media

More information Distribution, Size of media (MB) ...
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Security features

More information Distribution, Compile time buffer checks ...
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Apple Silicon Support

More information Distribution, Direct Install ...
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See also

Notes

  1. Based on Debian
  2. Based on Fedora
  3. Based on Fedora
  4. Based on Debian
  5. From the Sources.gz files in the main, contrib and non-free sections of Debian Buster. On the 2020-06-12, Debian Sid, the development release, have 31717 source packages.
  6. Based on Debian
  7. Note this number is just of packages in the Official Gentoo Overlay (or Portage Tree). Several hundred other packages are available from other overlays
  8. Can be installed graphically (GTK+ and ncurses), but traditionally done by command line (install cd, live cd, netboot, and from distributions).
  9. Based on Debian
  10. Based on Debian
  11. Based on AUR
  12. Based on Debian
  13. Based on Debian
  14. Based on Debian
  15. Based on Gentoo
  16. Based on Fedora
  17. Based on Debian
  18. From the Sources.gz files in the main, contrib and non-free sections of Debian Jessie. On the 2015-11-21, Debian Sid, the development release, have 24757 source packages.
  19. Based on Debian
  20. From the Sources.gz files in the main,universe, multiverse and restricted sections of Ubuntu Wily.
  21. Based on Debian
  22. Based on Debian
  23. Based on Ubuntu

References

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