Which Linux Distribution? | Understanding Linux Distros

in this video I'm doing a general Linux distribution education and which one you should choose so this is just my follow up I have another video the best Linux version out there or a Linux distribution out there and I did that video is one of my very first Linux videos and I really wanted to update it just to kind of educate you the user and also help you pick out a distribution depending on your needs to that end I want to kind of show what the general Linux distribution timeline looks like pretty much the first one starts in 92 and it goes all the way up to today obviously and it is vast and when I say vast I mean it is vast if you start to look at all the Linux distributions it's a lot so what I did for this video was to basically dumb this down into the big distributions that everyone either Forks their project off of or borrows heavily from that code and I'm also gonna basically throw X's out there for users that you really should not use certain distributions from these well let's get going and start with the debian branch of Linux almost every popular distribution is based on Debian now I don't ever recommend a new person installing vanilla Debian but a vet you know I have no problems with because there's many customizations that like a bunt who has made that makes life a little bit easier for the new person out there when you're looking through this just keep in mind most of these distributions are either depreciated or just complete trash so I don't recommend just distro hopping all the way through it I don't they have a big problem and make fun of many youtubers that say hey here's a hundred different distributions choose one no that is not how you should be choosing Linux or your version of Linux so Debian's where you start it's almost a given and off of this branch I kind of put a logo of Ubuntu right here in the middle and I'm gonna zoom in on that a little this kind of gives you a good bearing of what you should expect when getting to a bun - now every other popular distribution is based on a bun - and in my eyes all they are is just a different look there's not really a big functionality functionality to change between Ubuntu in many of these distributions so I'm gonna just read off real fast some of these distributions that so many people recommend and use and to me it's just a bun - with a little bit different of a skin because functionality wise they operate pretty much the same most the install commands are the exact same on both of these systems so Ubuntu is your standard one you can look at videos and say hey that's kind of what I'm looking for as far as look and I've even made a video I'll link up here in the top that shows you how to change your bun - to look like Windows or OSX or pretty much any anything you want it to look like it does like three big ones of those just so you get a good bearing and then you can customize a little bit from there but if you don't want to do that you just want out-of-the-box look that's where these other distributions come in in my mind so I'm gonna just go through some of them coupon - that's like a KDE version so you can look at Katy Ubuntu there's Lube on - which is like a lightweight Ubuntu it doesn't come with a lot of the nicest etics but it can work on a really old machine just fine there's Katy neon which is like a newer version of KDE that looks pretty snazzy there's peppermint in elementary which are just offshoots I don't recommend them but they're very very popular so that's there when I come into this I always recommend people go to this one which is Linux Mint it's like it has a really good Windows vibe to it so if you're from coming from Windows to the Linux world Linux Mint usually I say that's where you should start if you don't like Linux Mint try Ubuntu if you want a different look and feel it's just a little bit harder getting around when you're first coming to it but this is a great starting point and this is the debian fork and what makes all these distros pretty much the same is they a lot of them use the same package manager which is apt so when you see online apt install whatever package you know it could be VirtualBox or whatever it might be it's just gonna go out to the repository and install that program for you so when you see the apt command you're almost always dealing with the Debian based system and most of those are universal for all these distributions however the two main distributions you should be focused on is Debian and Ubuntu if it's Linux Mint or any of these other flavors knock yourself out but honestly I rather recommend someone go with Ubuntu and learn how to modify at once you get your feet wet if you're coming from Windows and you're just not very tech savvy Linux Mint is a great option for that as it's very similar to the windows the look and feel but that's it for this section of Linux I hope you got a lot from this section and it's one of the big things most beginners should focus on and I don't recommend you drop out of the Debian realm or a distribution blanket for all these and I recommend just sticking to the ones I mentioned today but this videos about the whole of Linux so let's go ahead and continue on okay this next one is going to be the susi branch and I know what you're thinking you know earlier in the video I kind of said hey this is 92 all the way back here all the way to present well slack where's before SUSE well if su sees our forcus lac where should I ever install slack where no but don't don't ever install slack where it's just a bad idea and for one reason and one reason only their package manager is basically crap I'm trying to think of a good reason there's gonna be some veteran Linux guys that are probably gonna get on here and flame me but it's just junk you go to install packages and Slackware and it's unable to find dependencies that makes it useless in my mind and you might as well just go to the github and build it from source and that's why slack where is just crap I don't like it I don't think it's a good version of Linux and no more to really be said there I'm not gonna stick on it but it is also one of the very very first distributions of Linux and that's why it's still going it's still being developed but it's I don't like it I don't recommend it to anybody a vet a new person an intermediate nobody should use it other than to install it once tinker around figure it out and then never use it in but SUSE SUSE is a completely different beast a different story altogether now it has been developed just a year or after slack where as you see on the chart and it has continued on and then open SUSE came in I think that's like around 2010 and it is a very very popular a lot of popular Linux youtubers such as like Brian lund oak or the Linux gamer he all they both use open SUSE from what I know and I have installed it I've kind of take it around with it I have not done it as my daily driver and I really liked what I saw but when I did install it I had some issues that I just at the time I didn't have enough time to work through all those and really give a video review an Oriole of how to use it but I still you know obviously if those guys are using it it's gotta be one of the top distributions and it works a lot differently than many other ones as a lot of the system configurations done in something called you asked the package manager is like zipper is I think what it's called and it does find like dependencies and other things and that's why SUSE open SUSE is really the king of what I recommend people regular SUSE you know like hey why don't you use that well that actually requires a subscription much like Red Hat requires a subscription to install open SUSE on the other hand anybody can install it and that's the difference between the two there may be some other ones I think open SUSE runs a little bit of a bleeding edge much like Fedora does to Red Hat and that's where they test out a lot of things and open SUSE has a rolling release like an Arch Linux which means everything stays up-to-date on I think it's tumbleweed that has the rolling release where leap is more of a Ubuntu style where it updates every six months to a year I believe so let's go into Red Hat Linux this guy is awesome I love Red Hat I love CentOS I love Fedora and that's what we're talking about here and it is very big in the linux space if you see RPM packages like DaVinci Resolve and a lot of enterprise or business great applications all tailored around these three individuals it's because they're just rock-solid they don't update very often in the case of CentOS and Red Hat such as redheads just now releasing beta 8 and it has been on version 7 for 5 years or some crap I mean it's been a long time since the last major release CentOS lags behind Red Hat but it's a free version of Red Hat Red Hat like SUSE runs on a subscription-based service and you have to pay for it we're Cintas is completely free and you can just install and it runs I think usually about six months behind redhead depending it's community-driven so that's why but both very very solid releases and if you're doing like a web server a lot of times I prefer to run one of these because I know it's just gonna run and run and run until I go and turn the dang thing off because that's just how it is or if it has hardware failure because these OS is just go forever great for any thing that's why you know rel or RHEL those acronyms it's Red Hat Enterprise Linux that's what it stands for and they are meant for business now the fedora well that's meant for you if you're going into business and you want to do Linux in a business you need to properly install a fedora on your home machine as most of the package managers it uses yum and these to use yum I believe the new versions that are coming out rel8 should be releasing in 2019 finally and CentOS should follow shortly thereafter and they will switch the package manager to DNF and yum is what they are on right now both are pretty much the same DNFs a little bit better about finding dependencies where yum is still a little bit older people have released like yum for that helps with that but overall I highly recommend just using DNF when you can if you're using fedora most if your install commands will be DNF and if you're using an older version of CentOS or Red Hat 7 and before it's all gonna be um but that's it for this branch I'm not going to mention any of these other distributions because I don't recommend any of them the only thing that I might pause to say is may hate Oracle Linux that's interesting but not something I recommend someone doing it's gonna be one out of maybe a hundred businesses that are going to be running that most of all this other stuff is all gonna be your those three are the ones you need to learn everything else there might be the obscure business that uses it but for the most part nobody else is gonna be mess with it and you shouldn't either these are the three you should stick to in this Fork and if you're just getting into it and you want to learn Enterprise Linux stick with fedora tinker around a lot of people like to run it as its main thing on my work PC it's what I run I use Fedora 29 I'm bleeding edge at work for this at home I use a Debian based system but this is what I'm using right now all right let's jump into the final part I wanted to go over Arch Linux now you're like you're jumping right over gin - what's up with that well it's kind of like a running joke is like hey you must be a masochist if you use gen 2 because you have to install pretty much everything it's extremely modular which means it doesn't come loaded with anything you're installing from command line and then you're installing the display manager then you're installing the desktop and then you're installing like the clock or all kinds of crazy things in there so it's very very modular one use case for Gen 2 would be if you were to build a specific Linux box to do one thing or two things and you only wanted to install those specific programs and you didn't need any of the other flair to go with it Gen 2 would be an option in that case because it pretty much comes bare-bones and you just build it up now some people like that kind of sounds like arch not quite and I'm gonna tell you right now arch is kind of the same way it's both these packages are meant for very advanced users you install it from a command line they don't come with a desktop experience and you have to pick your desktop manager and that's really important to know because it is a long laundry list of things to get it going arch it has what's called arch user repository and people love these rave about them I haven't personally used arch extensively as in a desktop environment before so I'm gonna be doing that soon and doing like a 10-day experience over the entire arch experience from install to daily driver usage but arch itself once you get it going it does have our cheese or repositories which make it very easy to install pretty much any program that's in those repositories everything else you're gonna be building from source if it's not in the pac-man package manager and pac-man is a very good package manager I highly recommend it but it's not as extensive as Debian is now the very first rebuttal someone will tell me a big hard core Arch user is well arch is far more up to date a lot of deviance repositories are dated and that is true when you go to install let's say today in Debian or a Debian based distribution it's gonna install I think 2.8 which is the older version of now I think it's 2.1 I don't know how about real numbers went less than but that's another video all together on the development team but the newer version of is installed by default on arch as is everything because the entire distributions are rolling release you always get the latest and greatest the bleeding edge keyword bleeding edge because there's gonna be times where things might not work a hundred percent because it is literally patching you know on a weekly basis so it will continue to patch and I like it for that because hey you get to see what's coming out very soon we're in Ubuntu based distributions you might be waiting six months if you don't manually go in and update the kernel or go in and download the newest up-to-date repository and manually install that version of like person but that's arch ingento in a nutshell I kind of lump these together they are not anything alike from each other and Gen 2 is very very different from arch but they have the same philosophy that's kind of why I kind of put them together in this segment so those are the major things that you deal with when it comes to Linux I hope that sheds a little more light out of the four main packages Arch Red Hat Debian and open SUSE or SUSE those are the four you need to know about they use different package managers they function differently but the very underlying thing about Linux is they're all running on the same kernel and you can pretty much build any program from source on all of these distributions so I'm not singling one out it just goes about it in a lot of different ways so when you talk to you know Elena's Torvalds he's like I don't really care it's all the same to me which I get that and I think a lot more ye Linux users need to get that as well we need to stop going from distribution to distribution to distribution you need to stick to these big dogs I think these all these fragmentation that's happened in space has done nothing but bad things for Linux as a whole it's why there's no adoption they need to be run by someone with backing whether it's a company whether it is just an established group a collective like arch arches community driven it that's your thing go with arch if you're an advanced user go with arch if you were wanting more backing and you want a company go with Suzy or Debian you know both Debian and bun - those are big companies that help maintain them same with Red Hat Red Hat is more of a tried-and-true a lot of people don't like the fact that you know it runs such old kernels or old software but it's built for stability and reliability and that's why you you's like bet Red Hat or Santos and that's just a broad stroke of what Linux is what distributions you should be looking at and choosing and why on this channel I'm not gonna be jumping around on this YouTube channel you're not gonna go hey what's the distribution of the week I'm gonna say get a life coach at the hundreds of other YouTube channels that have just a huge amount of distributions that's not gonna be my channel my channel is going to be focused on actual Linux knowledge because when it gets down to it and you get knowledgeable enough the distribution does not matter and these four distributions I honestly encourage start with Debian but work your way through all four of them because they fundamentally work differently from the different package managers once you get two or three under your belt you'll start to learn oh well a lot of these things are the same it's just a matter of building and compiling this certain program that may not be on here or adding this repository so my package manager can install that program and pretty much all of them work that way it's just a matter of learning the syntax for that specific distribution and out of those four you should have a good grasp now one thing I didn't mention in this video is like Android and other offshoots of Linux I don't consider them viable even though Android is technically open-source and it's all the way you know used on lumbering mobile phone it's just a whole different beast together and for this I mainly want to limit it to desktop computers and that's why I stuck to these four branches of Linux that I think every person should know about and every person should try and use but I don't recommend people going in just distro hopping all the way through everything and doing like twenty distros and no Debian you know the Debian branch I just don't get it I'll install something on VirtualBox just to show you what what it's about but I don't recommend just having all these every which way and I didn't make that clear in my first video and after really using Linux for a bit now that's kind of my conclusion I'm coming to that I really like to stick with like a vanilla Ubuntu and then just customize it to look like a linux mint if I want that or a KDE style and install KDE on a bun too and just customize it myself instead of relying on these other distros that just popped up you should not choose your distribution over how it looks you can make any distribution look how you want it to look and that is the point of this video to share that knowledge and if you have trouble doing that please check out my other video you know I have one up there how to change Ubuntu I I forked a script in fixed it a couple times there's a couple outdated lines that I went ahead and repaired and that would change Ubuntu to look like OS X or Windows and that's a very easy thing that pretty much everyone can do now to the advanced users you know you can pick out your display manager you know you can pick out your desktop environment all these things can be switched around at will pretty much on any distribution and that is pretty much it for this video I know I kind of rambled on a little bit here towards the end and I don't want to make it any longer but that is Linux distributions and how I see them in what you should choose especially starting out and then move on from there you

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 268,017

Keywords: best linux distributions, best linux distro, best linux distro 2018, best linux distro 2019, best linux distro for beginners, best linux distros, best linux os, chris titus tech, distro, linux, linux distribution, linux distributions, linux distro, linux distro 2018, linux distro 2019, linux distros, linux tutorial, top 5 linux distros, top linux distributions, top linux distro, what are linux distros, which linux distro is best, which linux distro to use

Id: DKFnqAtEOvc

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 15 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I don't like that guy, he is pretending to be a noob who is doing a "Linux for 30 days challenge" for clicks. While he is clearly very capable with Linux based on his other videos..

[u/konukonur]

Debian is not a company even newbies know that.

[u/[deleted]]

You need only to understand Arch in order to understand them all