linux distribution dichotomy

i am sure people familiar with linux might have issue on how i describe the distribution, since i leave many out. I loaded my first linux distribution in 1997 and i am confident in my experiences with them since.

There are corporate distributions and community distributions.

Red Hat is the big corporate release here in the states, but there is a new player, Ubuntu by Canonical. There is also OpenSuSE that used to be a community distro, then was under Novell, but is now under Attachmate. I do not talk much about SuSE, but I used to run it, but do not anymore.

Canonical blurs this line with a corporate supported (if you chose to pay) community release called Ubuntu. It is released in two ways also in many flavors, but, long term and standard. Long term or LTS for Long Term Support are heavily developed version of their linux distribution that is designed primarily for stability and released every 2 years. They are maintained for security purposes for 3 years, but the latest LTS 12.04 is going to be maintained for a 5 year support cycle.The standard release is available every 6 months and used to be timed with the GNOME release cycle, but since GNOME has changed its direction, Ubuntu has developed a shell for gnome shell and called it Unity. The release cadence has now been internalized to fit with Canonical's goals to become a leader in Linux desktops. I have to laugh a bit since that was a very corny statement. The other flavors of Ubuntu have different desktops and are the strict community releases. I prefer them over the big Ubuntu release, but more on that later.

Community based distributions are developed by programmers that are not under a company, they develop it among themselves. Arch comes to mind and again trhe mother of them all, Debian. Red Hat sponsors a community developed distribution called Fedora. Mint Linux has an awesome set of distros that have a large audience and is making some advances in Linux usability.

The corporate release by Red Hat is called Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and is for sale, but since the code is open source and as such free, paying Red Hat is technically paying for support. We can get the same desktop as RHEL in a distribution called CentOS, but we cannot call Red Hat to have them answer questions about it. One thing to note is that Red Hat encourages people that for some reason or another aren't ready to pay for Red Hat to in fact run CentOS. Red Hat has even made it easier for CentOS to stay current and make the CentOS experience a good one. Perhaps if you like CentOS, then you will opt for Red Hat supported service when you are ready. You have to love that in a company.

Corporate enterprise linux installs are very stable and have a large install base, like hundreds or thousands of desktops within an organization. The software that they consist of has had time to mature and is considered "stable" due to extensive code review. Some consider them boring or less functional, but there is nothing dysfunctional about stabilty.