Continuation of a tutorial for non-geek Linux users, this time explaining what a "Distro" is and why it is important that you know about the Distro concept.

Measuring the popularity of Linux has always been a difficult thing. A well used method is the Distrowatch rankings. This simply measures the visits on each distro page on the site every day.

Brian Proffitt recently tackled the topic of distro-hopping over on LinuxPlanet. Proffitt wonders whether the practice might be passe or something to be discouraged, but it's here to stay and should be encouraged rather than looked at askew. Distro-hopping, if you're not familiar with the term, is the practice of switching Linux distributions.

So, what do you do if there's no distro which meets your specific needs? Or, what if you want a distro that doesn't bother you with any pesky prompting but just sets itself up exactly how you like it? In these cases - or even just for the fun of it - you can always make your own distro. And here's how.

With the recent popularity netbooks have experienced in the last two years we have seen a slew of Linux distros released gear specifically for these tiny screens. For the last couple of weeks I have had my Asus EEE PC booting an upcoming netbook orientated distro called Jolicloud.

This is the first of a sequence of posts where we’ll take a look at a few of the main Linux distros to find out which are the most welcoming to Linux newbies.

The first distro to be analyzed is Fedora 9 beta.

Distrowatch gives some pretty decent stats on the main Distros but for a while I've wanted to know how Google sees their popularity; mainly by how many pages mention specific distros.

This distro doesn't disappoint. I've always leaned toward Gnome, but this XFCE distro has an edge over Gnome and other XFCE distros.

Distro-hopping is easy and fun. Linux users distro-hop to solve problems and to try new software. But is it necessary? Haven't most Linux distributions reached a state of polish that makes distro-hopping unnecessary?