What is a Linux distribution anyway?
Linux works in a quite different way to Windows, so to make an informed choice you need to understand how all the components of a distribution fit together
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f you’re coming from Windows or macOS, where the operating system name is all you need to know, you might be wondering what exactly a Linux distribution is, how a display server differs from a desktop environment, and where apps and packages fit into the mix.
A distribution – often shortened to distro – is the overarching operating system, including the kernel, the graphical interface, the code that interfaces between different hardware elements and so on. As such, while we might consider Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint and the like to be “distros”, your Ubuntu distro might be significantly different to ours.