What's the best Linux distro for you?

Choosing the best Linux® distribution (distro) for you requires a few considerations. For example, do you need a community or enterprise distro? What use cases does your distro need to be able to handle? Are you using on-premise servers, private clouds, public clouds, or a combination of those? This article examines these topics and more to help you make an informed decision. 

What’s a Linux distribution?

A Linux distro is an installable operating system (OS) that’s built from the Linux kernel and supports user programs, repositories, and libraries. Each vendor’s or community's version of Linux is a distro.

Because Linux is open source and released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), anyone can run, study, modify, and redistribute the source code, or even sell copies of their modified code. This differs greatly from traditional operating systems like UNIX, Microsoft Windows, and macOS, which are proprietary and not modifiable.

There are many Linux distros, including: 

Linux distros vary widely in what they do, how they do it, and how they’re supported. Some are designed as Linux desktop environments―such as Xfce, Raspberry Pi OS, and Cinnamon―while others support back-end IT systems like enterprise or web servers.

Choosing the distro that suits your needs depends on what you’ll be using it for and which tools you require. First, consider whether you need an enterprise or a community Linux distro.

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Community—or upstream—distros are free Linux versions primarily supported and maintained by an open source software-development community. Examples of those are Fedora Linux and openSUSE. Enterprise—or commercial—Linux distros are often available through a subscription from a vendor and don’t rely solely on community support. Examples of those include Android and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The main difference between community and enterprise distros is who decides what features and capabilities are added into each distro’s release. A community distro’s direction is set by contributors, who choose and maintain packages from a wide variety of open source software options. The direction of an enterprise distro is set by the vendor and is usually based on its customers’ needs.

For example, Fedora Linux, developed by the Fedora Project, is the community distro of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat is the upstream project’s primary sponsor, but thousands of independent developers contribute to it. Each contributor, including Red Hat, brings their own ideas to the larger community to be tested and debated for inclusion into Fedora Linux. This makes Fedora an ideal place for Red Hat to put new features through its own set of tests and quality-assurance processes. Those features can then be incorporated into a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

If community Linux is free, why would you want to pay for a commercial distribution? Community distros are a great option if you have limited experience with the command line or just want to experiment. But if you’re trying to run a server for a long period of time, community distros might not be the best choice. They rely on forum-based support from community members, and release cycles can be unpredictable.

Commercial distros, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, provide the latest open source innovation with the stability and maintenance an enterprise needs. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers 10 years of lifecycle support (as opposed to Fedora Linux’s 2 years), so you can better maintain long-term applications. With an enterprise distro, you get patches, updates, upgrades, expert technical guidance, and access to training and tutorials. Enterprise distros sometimes include package managers, which are programs that help with the installation and management of Linux software packages. 

Read about the value of enterprise Linux solutions

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The technologies in your IT configuration need to work together. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a standardized operating system that underlies all your workloads to help make them:

• Portable: Move your workloads without interruption across multiple environments to meet your business needs.
• Accessible: Working in different environments with unique configuration, access, and administrative controls can lead to skills gaps. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can take advantage of Red Hat’s decades of expertise in Linux, tailored training and consulting services, and deployment and management solutions. These help make Red Hat Enterprise Linux more accessible to people of varying skills.
• Scalable: Scale your workloads across diverse infrastructure, from bare-metal servers, virtual machines, and containers to private and public clouds―including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud. This allows you to remain flexible and adaptable based on your workload parameters at any given time.
• Security focused: Not all Linux distributions provide the security necessary for enterprise use cases, leaving you open to security vulnerabilities. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you get a documented supply chain, compliance with government and commercial security standards, and security patches often within 24 hours of a critical vulnerability being made public.
• Stable long term: Your workloads require a modern OS with a clear upgrade path and long-term support, so you can plan at your own pace. 

9 benefits of standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives you a consistent, stable foundation across hybrid cloud deployments, along with built-in manageability and integration with the broader Red Hat management and automation portfolio. Our engineers continually work to improve the user experience―including ease of use, reliability, the user interface, and security features―so your infrastructure performs well no matter your use case and workload. 

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