Supplemental Reading for Server Operaring Systems

For more other information on Server Operating Systems check out the link.

Which Distribution to Choose?

You should ask yourself several questions when choosing a new distribution:

Has your employer already standardized?
Do you want to learn more?
Do you want to certify?

You will quickly notice that technical differences are mainly about package management systems, software versions and file locations. Once you get a grasp of those differences, it becomes relatively painless to switch from one Linux distribution to another.

Some tools and utilities have vendor-supplied front-ends, especially for more particular or complex reporting. The steps included in the text may need to be modified to run on a different platform.

Debian Family

The Debian distribution is the upstream for several other distributions including Ubuntu, Linux Mint and others. Debian is a pure open source project and focuses on a key aspect: stability. It also provides the largest and most complete software repository to its users.

Ubuntu aims at providing a good compromise between long term stability and ease of use. Since Ubuntu gets most of its packages from Debian’s unstable branch, Ubuntu also has access to a very large software repository.

Commonly used on both servers and dekstops
DPKG-based, uses apt-get and front-ends for installing and updating
Upstream for Ubuntu, Linux Mint and others
Long Terms Release (LTS)

Red Hat/Fedora Family

Fedora is the community distribution that forms the basis of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Oracle Linux. Fedora contains significantly more software than Red Hat’s enterprise version. One reason for this is a diverse community is involved in building Fedora; it is not just one company.

The Fedora community produces new versions every six months or so. Once installed, CentOS Stream is also very close to to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is the most popular Linux distribution in enterprise environments.

CentOS historically has been basically a copy of RHEL with some time delay after updates.
CentOS Stream gets updates before RHEL, but otherwise is quite close to it. Thus, newer features will be absorbed quicker.
Red Hat ended support for CentOS 8 at the end of 2021.

OpenSUSE Family

The relationship between OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is similar to the one we just described between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In this case, however, i decided to use OpenSUSE as the reference distribution for the OpenSUSE family due to the difficulty of obtaining a free version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The two products are extremely similar and material that covers OpenSUSE can typically be applied to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with no problem.