Redhat was used for the brand of a commercial Linux solution from 2004. The free operating system was moved to Fedora after major reorganisations of the company.

Fedora is used by Redhat as the test bed for the now commercial Redhat products but still is very advanced and a popular choice for many users.

Centos is a rebuild of the commercial Redhat distribution but without the support. It is freqently used by organisations preparing for a Redhat commercial solution.

Debian provides a vast quantity of readily available packages. Many other distributions have been built on Debian. It proves to be solid and well supported.

Ubuntu was first announced in 2004 and became very popular very quickly. This was one of the first distributions designed to be less unfriendly to the normal computer user.

Suse started in 1992 when four German Linux enthusiasts put together a basic distribution on a floppy disk. This is one of the most popular European distributions with the backing of Novell since 2003 and strong support options.

FreeBSD does not use the Linux kernel and is much more traditional Unix-like, dating back to the early 1990's. However, many of the typical open source applications are available.

Others There are hundreds of open-source Unix-like distributions for many hardware platforms and almost any task. A user can normally switch between these with relative ease as they share common environments and programs even when jumping from a supercomputer to an embedded broadband router or PDA. Many modern distributions are provided on "Live CD's" which enable the user to sample the distribution without affecting software already installed on the computer. This provides an easy way for prospective users to sample before committing to a particular route.