You’ve probably heard a bit about Linux Distros with exotic names such as “Ubuntu”, “Slackware”, “Red Hat” and hundreds of others. So just what is a distro? Simply put it’s a collection of programmes that when bundled together make a working computer system.

Technically speaking a Linux distro comprises the Linux kernel and thousands of other programmes that make it all work together. Programmes to drive your graphics, programmes to enable your wireless card, programmes to send and receive e-mail, understand mouse movements and even just to play games or surf the web. The majority of these separate programmes are written under the GNU licence; hence a Linux distro is more properly called a GNU/Linux distribution or just Linux for short.

The choice of which programmes to include in a distro is vast, so different people compiling these distros will have different ideas about what is the best combination and of course what the typical end use is. A big business with dozens of servers might chose the “Red Hat” distro, a geek with the latest and greatest gadgets cobbled together with duct tape to form a one of system might chose “Slackware” and the home user who wants to surf the web and listen to some music might well go for “Ubuntu”.

It’s not that you couldn’t run Red Hat as a home system or Slackware in big business, just that each was designed with a particular typical use in mind and excels at that out of the box and may need considerable tweaking to get it perfect on the other types.

This article isn’t about big business or of any interest to the techie geek, so I shall focus on the distros best for the home user newbie. Which one you chose depends on you; there is no “best” distro, just best for you. If you don’t like one, just try another.

Many distros aimed at the home user feature a “Live CD” this is a try before you buy distro. You can run it directly off the CD with no need to install anything to your hard disk, however remember that as it runs off the CD it will be many times slower that an installed distro and of course you can’t save anything. However the timid and nervous can have a taste of that particular distro safe in the knowledge that their hard drive is safe and it may reveal hardware incompatibilities. If you like it there is an option to permanently install it.

Here is just a list of a few of the distros aimed at easy home:-

Ubuntu: the name means “humanity to others” funded by multi millionaire Mark Shuttleworth this behemoth went from zero to top of the pack in next to no time. This simple to use distro makes it easy install new programmes and download drivers and codec’s using simple wizards to get the latest multimedia goodies working.

Mint: based on Ubuntu, this popular distro has all the latest multimedia stuff already in with the main CD, so no downloading, however may be illegal to use due to patent violations, depends which country you live in but Europe is O.K. and the USA isn’t.

Mandriva: For many years this was “the” distro for newbies to install due to its simplified wizards, and graphical installer, however recently other distros have been stealing its ground. The newest releases have shown some signs that Mandriva is determined to reclaim lost ground.

PCLinuxOS: Based on Mandriva, this new kid on the block aims to be more user friendly than its progenitor.

Fedora: Based on Red Hat this popular distro has been gaining popularity, has one of the largest development communities and has recently tended to focus more on the latest whiz bang bleeding edge technology.

Open Suse: Backed by the mighty Novell Corporation, this distro goes it alone, as many members of the wider Linux community hate the deals its parent company signed with Microsoft.

Simply Mepis: One of the first to offer an install via live CD route, still a cracking distro but recent releases have been a little slow, due to money worries by it’s head.

This list is by no means exhaustive; there are hundreds of distros to choose from. Just check out the listings at distrowatch.com if the distro you try doesn’t suit you or maybe doesn’t recognise all your hardware, just try another. If one doesn’t work for you then one of the others surely will.