The Five Distros That Changed Linux

[zridling]

The Five Distros That Changed Linux
Linux Magazine / Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Linux’s history can be measured in both releases 2.0, 2.6, and so on, and in its major distributions, which brought these releases to the masses at large. Here’s my list of the top five major Linux distributions that had the most impact in the operating system’s brief history.

- Slackware (1993) The first truly popular Linux distribution
- Debian (1994) Welcome to the community
- Caldera (1993/4) The first Linux for business
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1AS (2002) Linux joins the enterprise
- Ubuntu 4.10 (2004) Linux for everyone

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The disagreements among the commenters are delicious.

[mouser]

neat stuff 

[Tuxman]

Ubuntu is not "Linux for everyone", SuSE is ... Ubuntu is more like "Debian for hype machinists"...

[zridling]

Ha! I honestly try to steer new Linux users away from the Ubuntu family. They see the stunning number of bugs in the distro and think that's normal. It isn't. Mark Shuttleworth is stepping down, but his mouth wrote a lot of checks his distro never cashed. As Tuxman and 40hz have stated elsewhere, there are far better distros to use when starting out.

[f0dder]

They see the stunning number of bugs in the distro and think that's normal. It isn't.

[Tuxman]

What's wrong?