Various popular Linux Distributions in Computing Industry.
Here are the following various Linux distributions in Computing industry:

1. Fedora:




           Fedora is a popular open source Linux-based operating system.
Fedora is designed as a secure, general purpose operating system. The operating system is developed on a six-month release cycle, under the auspices of the Fedora Project. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat.

Fedora Releases

There are two Fedora releases a year. Fedora releases do use a codeword for the release during development, but this is invariably dropped following release, in favor of an integer release number. Here are the codeword and versions for the last few releases:
Codename
Release
Release Date
End of Support
Lovelock
15
May 2011
20th June 2012
Verne
16
November 2011
2nd February 2013
Beefy Miracle
17
May 2012
30th July 2013
Spherical Cow
18
January 2013
14th January 2014
Shroedinger's Cat
19
May 2013
N/A
Heisenbug
20
December 2013
N/A
The user will not notice much difference in the desktops between using Fedora 15and Fedora 20. This is probably a good thing, as most users prefer continuity to radical overhauls.
The current Fedora 20 desktop is subtly different from that of Fedora 18 - collapsing the options on the User menu into just three. In general, Fedora 20 does not seems to be locked down quite so heavily by SE Linux by default.
Note: following the release of Fedora 20, Fedora abandoned the convention of assigning codewords to releases.

Different Versions of Fedora

Fedora is available in several different versions - either using different desktops or slanted towards a particular type of user. These are known as Fedora Spins and include the following:
Ubuntu Variant
Desktop
Description
Standard
Gnome
Gnome edition
KDE Spin
KDE
KDE edition
Xfce Spin
Xfce
Xfce edition
LXDE Spin
LXDE
LXDE edition

Fedora Minimum Requirements

The minimum requirements for the current (20) release of Fedora are:
  • 1GHz Processor
  • 1 GB
  • 10 GB free disc space
  • DVD drive or USB port (-for installation media)

The Advantages of Fedora

Fedora is a great choice for the more experienced Linux hand but it is not, perhaps, the most user-friendly for the novice..
 Linux Fedora has two main strengths (-over and above the usual Linux ones):
·        It champions new technologies: Red Hat uses it as a vehicle for testing and proving technologies for release in its market-leading commercial RHEL release
·        Reliability: in our experience Fedora 15 is extremely robust: it seems to cope well with flakey hardware and any application failures are confined to that application, rather than affecting the whole operating system (-unlike, in our experience, Ubuntu 11.04)

The Disadvantages of Fedora

The main drawbacks of using Fedora are:
·        Fedora is a great choice for the more experienced Linux hand but it is not, perhaps, the most user-friendly for the novice, with the user often having to resort to the the command line to complete common tasks. Particular issues we've had are:
    • If the Software Updater has two packages from different sources, it can be difficult to track down the offending package (-if we have a lot of updates pending) and to fix it without resorting to yum on the command line, which is confusing to most newcomers.

·        There are nowhere near as many applications available for Fedora as for Ubuntu - and those that are often need to be installed via the command line or by adding custom repositories (-such as RPM Fusion).

·        Fedora is quite large and requires a reasonably capable machine to run effectively (-see the minimum requirements). If our machine is particularly old (-and we can't upgrade it) then we may be better off with something like Puppy instead.

·        Fedora 18 in particular is, by default, quite locked-down security-wise. This means the user may need to spend time tweaking the security in order to run certain applications.

·        Fedora lacks support for any proprietary formats (-such as Flash, MP3, MP4, etc) meaning that the user will have to enable a secondary repository (-such as RPM Fusion and install and configure all these things manually.

2. Debian:


            Debian is a free operating system (OS) for our computer.
An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make wer computer run.
Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 51000 packages; precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on our machine. 

Debian’s primary advantages are:


·        It’s strict on open-source, by default. It comes with no proprietary software pre-installed, and the repositories enabled by default contain no proprietary software. It’s even stricter on open-source in this regard than Fedora, as Fedora has binary blobs on its kernel, Debian doesn’t any more (some older releases did). This is also a possible disadvantage, which is to be mentioned later.

·        It’s has the largest open-source community project in history behind it, the Debian Project, with almost a thousand volunteers.


·        It supports the most architectures of any binary Linux distribution. I said “binary” as Gentoo, a source distribution, has support for slightly more. If we believe DistroWatch Debian supports 9 architectures (as of 8 December 2017), while Gentoo supports 12, or 10 if we group all the 32-bit x86 architectures together.

·        Its package format, deb, is the most popular among software developers that package for the Linux platform. Granted deb packages often are not compatible with all Debian-based distributions, usually they’re just compatible with the precise distribution they were designed for and usually that distribution is Ubuntu, a Debian derivative.


·        It, and its derivatives, has the most derivatives of any Linux distribution known.

·        It is the second eldest currently-maintained Linux distribution, after Slack ware.


·        It’s flexible, in two ways. Both the ‘branch’ we can be on, hence how bleeding-edge v/s stable the software we use will likely be, and also in the sense we can choose from several different options in the installer. The installer lets we choose to have a minimal system with only the command-line, or one with a desktop environment, with or without several other utilities like printing abilities.

 There are four, sometimes five branches that are actively maintained. The branches that are always supported include:

o   oldstable — the previous stable release of Debian. This is presently Debian 8 or Jessie. Packages in this branch are by-in-large old, >3 years old to be precise.
o   stable — the current stable release of Debian, which is presently Debian 9 or Stretch. Packages in this repository can get fairly old but as the latest stable release was earlier this year they’re not that old yet.
o   testing — this branch contains newer packages, that started out in the unstable branch, but have been adequately tested to be deemed stable enough to land in this branch. Eventually packages in the testing repository are frozen and used to create the next stable release of Debian. By “frozen” I mean the packages are tested further and the only changes are bug and security fixes, no version bumps.
o   unstable (sid) — this branch can be thought of as akin to a bleeding-edge rolling release model distribution as it contains the very latest packages the Debian developers have packaged (although beware rolling distribution users these packages aren’t as bleeding-edge as Arch’s). Although that’s not to say that every package therein is all that new, for example, their Eclipse (the IDE)-related packages are some 5 years old (aside from the odd bug/security fix).

The branch that is sometimes available is old stable, presently Debian 7 or Wheezy, which as someone can probably guess are super-ancient.

Its disadvantages include:


·        That it’s so strict on open-source. There is a non-free repository for it, but it just contains device drivers and firmware. Being so strict on open-source, by default, means that if we have devices that need proprietary drivers, including WiFi cards, we’ll need to connect to the net, add the non-free repository, and install the required packages from it. This can be a problem if the problem bit of hardware is wer WiFi card and we rely solely on WiFi to the connect to the internet.

·        (Depending on wer point of view) That it uses systemd. I have no problem with systemd, but many people do. The reason for these problems can be technical, but quite often they’re at least partly philosophical. systemd violates the Unix philosophy, which is that every component of a Unix or Unix-like system like Linux should do just one thing and do it well. System, depending on whom we ask, may do its jobs well but it does more than just one thing, hence violating this principle.
I know of two main Debian derivatives that use different init systems. AntiX and Devuan, both of which use Debian’s former init system before the release of Debian 8 in 2015, SysV init.
·        That even its unstable branch has some really outdated software. That and even the more bleeding-edge of the unstable branch’s software tends to be less bleeding-edge than that of Arch Linux, among other distributions.

·        That its package manager, APT, can be confusing to some in its syntax. Namely that there are so many commands belonging to it like apt-cache, apt-get, add-apt-repository, etc. This is somewhat less of a problem now that a simple apt command is out which combines the most common actions from the various commands of the APT package manager.


·        That package management from a cheroot into it can cause problems (and yes I am counting when the file systems like proc, dev and sys, are properly mounted up), especially if what one is installing or updating are kernel modules or the kernel itself. It’s not unique in this, RPM-based distributions, especially Fedora, seem a little touchy in this regard. I’m an Archer/Gentoo-er so being able to cheroot into it is very important to us.

·        That packaging for Debian is more complicated than it is for any other distribution I am aware of. What is so complicated is that with most package managers we merely write one file to specify the package’s details (excluding source files like patches), including how it is to be built, while with Debian we have to write a whole directory worth of files.


3. SuSe:


               SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is designed for servers, mainframes, and workstations but can be installed on desktop computers for testing as well. Major versions are released at an interval of 3–4 years, while minor versions (called "Service Packs") are released about every 18 months. SUSE Linux Enterprise products, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, receive more intense testing than the openSUSE community product, with the intention that only mature, stable versions of the included components will make it through to the released enterprise product.

Their name at founding was "S.u.S.E" and it was chosen as a German acronym for "Software und System-Entwicklung", which means "Software and systems development".


Advantages

·        Extensibility and minimalistic qualities of almost any installed piece of software.

·        No bundle ware, bloat ware, no viruses, no problems with official repositories in general.


·        Drivers are usually cleaner than proprietary operating systems and more maintained, usually it's also more compatible than other systems, but not given credit, because most people only whine when it doesn't work!

·        Documentation and online-resources are top notch and usually have many sides of the same story, which makes it an ideal learning environment.


Disadvantages

·        Fragmentation in terms of distros, user-interfaces (QT, GTK, etc.), packages.

·        Hardware-manufacturers don't see Linux as a market share worth considering and hence you will eventually find some (brand-new or obscure mostly) hardware that sadly doesn't run on Linux.

·        You have to walk across the "dead bodies" of Linux-elitism stereotypes. (Like any other community some forums and IRC-channels are bad, some people are rude, some are like RTFM, and some are just).

·        You eventually will be challenged, somehow (Can be argued to Neutral).

4. Slack Ware:


            Slack ware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Soft landing Linux System, Slack ware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributions, and is the oldest distribution that is still maintained.

Slack ware aims for design stability and simplicity and to be the most "Unix-like" Linux distribution.

Advantage:

·       Slack ware is the most stable version of Linux.
·        It is also (perhaps) the fastest version of Linux, and because Slack ware relies heavily on the usage of the Command Line, Slack ware basically forces you to actually learn “how to (properly) use Linux”.

Disadvantage:

·       It uses old versions of most packages (e.g. it still uses KDE Plasma 4 even though Plasma 5 came out in mid 2014) and new releases of the distribution are infrequent.
·       It has a relatively small official repository, although the unofficial Slack Builds project provides several more you can build for Slack ware.
·        few desktop environments / window managers are officially available for Slack ware too, like GNOME and i3 are not.

Note: However, if you feel you may be dependent on GUI's (graphic user interfaces) such as how things are done in Windows, Mac & Android, then Slack ware is definitely not for you. In short, if you really wish to learn Linux and/or you need rock solid stability - for use as a server, for example - then Slack ware is the best choice.