In this week’s edition of TLWIR, I will take a look at the continuing twentieth anniversary celebration of our beloved GNU/Linux operating system. I will also look at Microsoft’s olive branch extended to the Linux community. In yet another surprising turn of events, the U.S. Department of Defense has released its own GNU/Linux distribution.

The main objective of this blog is to help narrow down the list of Linux- and BSD-based distributions that a new user will feel comfortable using. Distributions that provide the same or better level of user-friendliness than the malware-infested and DRM-riddled operating system that they currently use.

Is a distro a distro a distro? Why would anyone care?

Well, choosing a Linux distribution is actually a matter of personal faith. There are largely three kinds of people: the one who use one of the many distributions available as is, those who install an available distribution and customize it to their satisfaction and the geeks who go a step further and create and use their own distribution. For the sake of simplicity, let's not talk about the third category for now.

Munich is now using a unified desktop system, Limux, its own distribution based on Ubuntu GNU/Linux on 14,000 of its total 15,000 desktops, spread over 51 offices across the city. That is 2,000 more than it's intended goal of using Limux on 80 % of its desktops.

After a Thanksgiving break, the Whirlwind Tech Tour is back on the move. This week, we address the issue of how Linux distributions compare in performance under different enterprise conditions.

"One of the things that is very confusing to new Linux enthusiasts is the "distro," or distribution. And one of the most confusing things about distributions, for the beginner, is that there is no official definition of what a distribution is, exactly: distributions existed in many forms long before anyone cared."

CentOS, Community ENTerprise Operating System, is a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not many would consider it a desktop distribution, but it could be configured as one, though it requires a bit more tweaking than other well known desktop distributions to just work. The latest stable version, CentOS 6, was released on July 10, 2011.

Linux comes in a wide variety of flavors, better known as distributions. Such an array can make choosing between them very difficult for both the experienced administrator as well as the new user migrating from a different operating system. Making a decision isn’t easy, but we will do our best to simplify the process of selecting the ideal Linux distribution for your needs.