Category:Distros
From Linux & Open Source @ NUS
As some of you might already know, Linux is really just the OS kernel. It does things like manage hardware, nanny running programs, and all that good background stuff you'd expect a helpful program to do. It doesn't do much in the way of word processing, image viewing, web browsing and the like - that's the job of the bundled applications that are distributed together with a particular version of the kernel. Think OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, Konversation, XChat, or Pidgin... pretty useful, but these are not Linux.
Thus the term distribution is used to refer to products (eg. Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, ... and Gentoo) which include a slew of such user applications with the Linux kernel (remark about Gentoo deleted.) Being the lazy bums we are, we usually refer to them as distros instead. Here you can find a list of different distros, and where you can find out more about them.
