As shown in the figure below:

The Red Hat Family

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) leads a family that includes CentOS, Fedora, and Oracle Linux.

Fedora is closely related to RHEL and contains significantly more software than the enterprise version of Red Hat. One reason is that building Fedora involved a diverse community, including many contributors who don’t work for Red Hat. It is also used as a test platform for future versions of RHEL.

CentOS is often used for events, demos, and LABS because it is free to end users and has a much longer release cycle than Fedora (which releases a new version every six months or so).

The basic version of CentOS is also almost identical to RHEL, the most popular Linux distribution in enterprise environments.

Some key points about the Red Hat distribution series

  • Fedora serves as an upstream test platform for RHEL.
  • CentOS is a near clone of RHEL, while Oracle Linux is primarily a copy with some changes (in fact, CentOS has been part of Red Hat since 2014).
  • RHEL/CentOS 7 uses the heavily patched 3.10 kernel, while RHEL/CentOS 8 uses version 4.18.
  • It supports hardware platforms such as Intel x86, ARM, Itanium, PowerPC, and IBM System z.
  • It uses the YUM package manager based on YUM and DNF RPM (more on that later) to install, update, and remove packages from the system.
  • RHEL is widely used by enterprises with their own systems.

The SUSE Family

The relationship between SUSE (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)) and OpenSUSE is similar to the relationship described between RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora.

We use OpenSUSE as the reference distribution for the SUSE family because it is free to end users. Because the two products are so similar, the materials that cover OpenSUSE can usually be applied to SLES without any problems.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is the upstream of OpenSUSE.

Kernel version 4.12 is used for OpenSUSE Leap 15.

It uses the RPM-based Zypper package manager (which we’ll cover in more detail later) to install, update, and delete packages from your system.

It includes YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) applications for system administration purposes.

SLES is widely used in retail and many other areas.

The Debian Family

The Debian distribution is upstream of several other distributions, including Ubuntu. In turn, Ubuntu is the upstream of Linux Mint and many other distributions. It is commonly used on servers and desktop computers. Debian is a purely open source community project (not owned by any company) with a strong focus on stability.

Debian provides users of any Linux distribution with the largest and most complete software repository to date.

Ubuntu is designed to provide a good tradeoff between long-term stability and ease of use. Since most of Ubuntu’s packages come from stable branches of Debian, it also has access to a very large software repository.

The Debian family is the upstream of Ubuntu, which is the upstream of Linux Mint and other products. Kernel version 4.15 is used for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It uses the dpkg-based APT package manager (using APT, apt-get, apt-cache, and so on) to install, update, and delete packages from the system. Ubuntu has been widely used for cloud deployment. Although Ubuntu is built on top of Debian and is based on GNOME underneath, it is visually different from the interface on standard Debian and other distributions.

More of Jerry’s original articles can be found on “Wang Zixi “: