Desktop Distributions

Fedora (http://fedoraproject.org/)

Awesome, new release with many enhancements. JCC

Unbuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/)

Very popular, runs from CD/DVD. JCC

pclinuxOS (http://www.pclinuxos.org/)

Too much!

Mandriva (http://www.mandrivalinux.com/)

Clean desktop, user friendly, nice desktop or laptop install, Red Hat based. It has the reputation of a fast desktop distribution, easy to use and with a nice "look and feel".

Debian (http://www.debian.org/)

Supports many architectures.

Slackware (http://www.slackware.com)

This granddaddy distro is one of the oldest Linux distributions around (1993). Slackware is probably the most "Unix-like" linux distribution around. -MW

Opensuse (http://www.opensuse.org/)

Most popular distribution in Germany. This distro is also available via the web for free, but not as Cd-iso's, so you have to make your installation media yourself, what will be difficult for newbies.

Live-CD Distributions (runs from CD)

Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org/)

It runs from CD; and does not have to be installed on the hard drive, although you can if you want to. Debian based.

Slax (http://www.slax.org based on Slackware)

This slackware-based liveCD distro will fit on a 3" mini-cdr. It's got a full KDE-based desktop enviroment as well as plenty of emergency-boot tools. Currently I'm working on hacking and remastering it to add Jan Kratochvil's captive-ntfs. This will provide safe read/write of NTFS filesystems. -MW

Enterprise-Class Distributions

White Box Enterprise Linux (http://whiteboxlinux.org/)

With Red Hat now no longer supporting versions 7.x and 8, and with Red Hat 9 support ending on April 30, 2004, Red Hat recommends either an upgrade to Fedora Core or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I recommend that you instead check out White Box Enterprise Linux. It is a redistributable distro based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code, and best of all, it is free!

CentOS (http://www.centos.org/)

This project is similar to Whitebox in that in provides sanitized builds of RHEL and is freely distributable. -MW

MISC

Fedora Legacy (http://fedoralegacy.org/) The fedora legacy project has come to an end. January 2007

From their site: "The goal of The Fedora Legacy Project is to work with the Linux community to provide security and critical bug fix errata packages for select End of Life Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core distributions. This will allow for a longer effective life for those releases." In a nutshell, Fedora Legacy will support Fedora Core releases for 1 year after fedora has stopped supporting a release. Also, Fedora Legacy is continuing to support both Redhat 7.3 and Redhat 9 in this same manner. It is noteworthy however that Fedora Legacy has discontinued support for Redhat 8.

BSD *NIXes

FreeBSD UNIX (http://www.freebsd.org)

Technically, this isn't Linux, but is a similar UNIX-clone type project that is very stable, portable and is quite mature. Along these same lines you'll find NetBSD and OpenBSD which are similar. -MW

OpenBSD UNIX (http://www.openbsd.org)

"The OpenBSD project produces a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. Our efforts emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography. OpenBSD supports binary emulation of most programs from SVR4 (Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, BSD/OS, SunOS and HP-UX."

Darwin (http://developer.apple.com/darwin/)

This is the core of Mac OS 10 less their GUI. Apple has both drawn from (Darwin is based on BSD) and contributed to the open source world. Darwin is available for both ppc and x86 architectures. BSD licenses basically allow you do do whatever you want with a piece of software, including selling it. (this is probably one reason why apple OS 10 isn't based on linux)

GNU-Darwin (http://www.gnu-darwin.org/)

This is a clone of Darwin O/S released under a GNU (not BSD) license.