Which GNU/Linux?

GNU/Linux was invented by Linus Torvald in 1991 when he was a college students of Helsinki University and he wasn't satisfied with MINIX, an operationg system that was invented by Andrew Tanembaum. He wrote the first kernel and published it on the newsgroup and starting from that time, the Linux kernel has started it's long journey until this moment. Linux is just a kernel, small part of operating system that can control every aspect of the system itself, like memory management, file management, input/output, etc. in order to build one operating systems, kernel need some tools that can do some specific task, called applications. The major program that was integrated to Linux kernel was published under GPL (GNU License Public) and so it was called GNU/Linux.

There is only one kernel, but why does there are so many version of Linux around the world? Those versions are called Linux's distros, which are developed by some people, community or company and they added their support or applications into their new bundle and released them as new distro. This is legal, since GPL granted this activity. No wonder why right now there are more than 50 distros for GNU/Linux around the world. You can view them all in DistroWatch.

While some of us thinks that this is common fenomena, but not for another people who has just started to know GNU/Linux. Sometimes, they were confused about the variety of GNU/Linux distros. Some prefer to use RedHat, while the other prefer SuSE, Mandrake, Gentoo, Slackware, etc.

If you are this kind of person (confused), than you should pick one distro and start learning it. When you have mastered it, you will find out that the outer shell looks different, but when you are playing with the inner shell, you will find many similarity. Don't be hesitate to try as much GNU/Linux distros as you can. Every distro have it's own characteristics.