Distro developments
A single kernel has enabled a good number of Linux distributions to blossom into life.
After looking into the development of the Linux kernel itself and the surrounding supporting software, let’s turn to how Linux distributions (distros) from this point were developed and branched into a wide-ranging ecosystem.
Distros enabled the use of the Linux kernel to grow rapidly. Not only did they ease the installation of Linux (which early on was a complex process of source compilation, gathering the right tools, creating filesystem layouts by hand, and bootloaders, all from the terminal on systems with limited resources), but one distro can also become the base for a whole new distro, tailored for a new use or audience.
Primordial soup
As Linux v0.01 was only released in September 1991, the first distribution of Linux – though by modern standards, it’s lacking in every department – created by HJ Lu, was simply called Linux 0.12. Released at the end of 1991, it came on two 5.25-inch floppy disks, and required a HEX editor to get running. One disk was a kernel boot disk, the other stored the root OS tools.
In those early days of distro evolution, things changed rapidly. Development was quickly adding base functionality, and people were trying out the best ways to package a Linux-based OS. MCC Interim Linux was released in February 1992 with an improved text-based installer, and was made available through an FTP server.
X Windows – the standard Unix windowing system – was ported, and TAMU Linux was released in May 1992 with it packaged: making it the first graphical distro.
While all of these are notable as being among the first Linux distros, they didn’t last. The same can be said for Softlanding Linux System (SLS), also released in May 1992, which packaged X Windows and a TCP/IP network stack. It’s notable, though, because of its shortcomings (bugs and a change to the executable system) inspired the creation of the two longest-running and, in many ways, most influential Linux distros: Slackware and Debian.
Nowadays, a number of base distros appear, reliably maintained by individuals, groups, or businesses. Once they’re established, stable and become popular, offshoots branch from these root distros offering new specialisations or features. This creates a number of base distro genera, formed around the original package manager and software repositories.
The effect is a Linux family tree (see page 43), where you can date all distros back to an initial root release. Some branches sprout and die; either the group maintaining it disbands or there’s no wider interest. Some branches become so popular they create a whole new genus, becoming the basis for a further expansion.
Evolution, not revolution
As with plants and animals, offshoots inherit traits, the base install, package manager, and software repositories being key. A package manager is how the OS installs, updates, removes and maintains the installed software, which includes downloading software packages from the managed software servers, called repositories. This can become contentious – these child distros are leeching off the parent’s bandwidth – but initially, while they’re growing, this use won’t look much different from normal user activity.
Bear in mind we’re back in 1992. You’re lucky if
there’s a 14.4Kb/s dial-up modem at home; expensive T1 lines (1.54Mb/s) are limited to academic institutions and larger businesses. The early TAMU v1.0 distro required 18 disks for the 26MB binaries, and 35 disks for the 50MB compressed (200MB uncompressed) source code. This obviously limited access in these early days to academics and those in suitable businesses, so distro evolution was slow.
Meet the ancestors
Softlanding Linux System was popular, but it was buggy and badly maintained, so in July 1993, Patrick Volkerding forked SLS and created Slackware – so named because it wasn’t a serious undertaking at the time, and was a reference to the Church of the SubGenius. This is the oldest Linux distro still maintained, and it’s about to see its version 15 release after 28 years. Slackware is interesting because it’s very much controlled and maintained by Volkerding, while followed by a small but enthusiastic band of users and contributors. Whereas many other distros have taken on modern enhancements, Volkerding sticks to older more traditional “Unix” ways of controlling services on Slackware. There’s no formal bug tracking, no official way to contribute to the project, and no public code repository. This all makes Slackware very much an oddity that stands on its own in the Linux world. Due to its longevity, however, Slackware has attracted a couple of dozen offshoots, and at least half are still maintained today.
In August 1993, Ian Murdock, also frustrated by Softlanding Linux System, established Debian, a combination of “Debby,” his girlfriend’s name at the time, and “Ian.” From the outset, it was established as a formal, collaborative open project in the spirit of Linux and GNU.
Early on in the Debian project, Bruce Perens maintained the base system. He went on to draft a social contract for the project and created Software in the Public Interest, a legal umbrella group to enable Debian to accept contributions. At the time, Perens was working at Pixar, so all Debian development builds are named after Toy Story characters. The Debian logo also has a strong similarity to the mark on Buzz Lightyear’s chin.
Debian is arguably the single most influential and important Linux distro ever. Just the sheer number of branches of distros from it would attest to that, but Debian is renowned for its stability, high level of testing, dedication to software freedom, and being a rigorously well-run organisation. It’s testament to its creator, Ian Murdock, who sadly passed away in December 2015.
Things were still moving slowly into 1994 – there was
just a single Slackware fork called SUSE and a few random Linux sprouts appeared, but all died out. Then in October 1994, Red Hat Linux was publicly released. Red Hat was established as a for-profit Linux business, initially selling the Red Hat Linux distribution and going on to provide support services. Red Hat went public in 1999, achieving the eighth biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street. It entered the NASDAQ-100 in December 2005 and topped $1 billion annual revenue in 2012. IBM purchased Red Hat in October 2018 – 24 years after its first release – for $34 billion. So that worked out very well.
A tale of hats and forks
Red Hat Linux was relaunched as Red Hat Enterprise in 2001, and its commercial success attracted a wide range of forks. Notably, Red Hat directly supports Fedora as its testing distro and CentOS as its free community edition. Or it did. CentOS is being shuttered – to understandable community disdain – and a rolling release, CentOS Stream, is replacing it. As an alternative, Red Hat Enterprise is now offered freely to community projects with fewer than 16 servers.
Meanwhile in Germany, SUSE (Software und System Entwicklung) started life as a commercially sold German translation of Slackware in late 1992. In 1996, an entire new SUSE distro and business was launched, based on the Dutch Jurix Linux, selling the new distro and support services.
SUSE was purchased by Novell in 2003, and in 2005, the openSUSE community edition was launched, while SUSE Linux Enterprise was developed in tandem for its commercial arm. SUSE was acquired in 2018 for $2.5 billion and returned double-digit growth through 2020, with a revenue of over $450 million. Yet despite its success, SUSE and openSUSE have only ever attracted a couple of forks. We could be wrong when we say this is
IAN MURDOCK’S LEGACY “Debian is renowned for its stability, high level of testing, dedication to software freedom, and being a rigorously well-run organisation.”
possibly down to their European roots.
It’s a distro inferno
Between the creation of Red Hat in 1994 and 2000, there were a number of Red Hat spin-offs, because at that point there was clear commercial interest in Linux. Throughout this period, Linux was best suited to business server tasks, where much of the open-source Unix work had been focused. However, by the end of the 1990s, 56k modems had become commonplace, early home broadband was just appearing, and modern graphical desktops were in development. Linux was about to get a whole new audience.
One early example was Mandrake Linux, in mid-1998. A fork of Red Hat, it was crazily aimed at making Linux easy to use for new users, using the new Kool Desktop Environment (KDE). The French/Brazilian development team gained a lot of attention but, ultimately, financial problems closed the project in 2011. However, its spirit continues in the excellent but less well-known Mageia and OpenMandriva projects.
A distro with humanity in mind
With Mandrake pointing the way, the early 2000s saw an explosion of distro releases. Now that the Debian project at this point was well established, well regarded and well known, it became the basis for hundreds of Linux distros. But we’ll only mention one: Ubuntu, released in 2004 by South African millionaire Mark Shuttleworth, who jokingly calls himself the selfappointed benevolent dictator for life. The Ubuntu Foundation was created in 2005 as a philanthropic project – Ubuntu is a Zulu word meaning humanity – to provide quality open-source software, with Canonical as the supporting commercial arm.
Ubuntu as a branch of Debian has itself seen over 80 distros fork from it, while Ubuntu has the highest share of all desktop Linux installs – though this is notoriously hard to measure – when users are polled. Why Ubuntu became so popular is hard to fully pinpoint. Key is just like Mandrake before it, Ubuntu set out to make desktop Linux easy for first-time users. It also offered the distro on free CDs via its ShipIt service until 2011, alongside fast, reliable server downloads. Furthermore, it was based on the popular Debian, it jumped on the new, slick Gnome desktop, and it set out a regular six-month release cycle, with a Long Term Support release every two years. Support was for 18 months (now nine months) for regular releases, and 36 months for LTS ones (now five years).
Ubuntu also offered great forums and help sites, along with a community council, and support for forks such as Xubuntu, Lubuntu and many others. It had sane defaults, too, and made it easier to install display drivers (an absolute pain 10-plus years ago), while offering a huge catalogue of tested, ready-to-run open-source software and dedicated server builds. We guess when you say all this out loud, it sounds pretty compelling!
Two core release branches we’ll quickly mention are Arch Linux and Gentoo, both released around 2000. Gentoo (named after the fastest penguin in the world) is a built-from-source distro compiled with specific optimisations for the hardware it’s going to run on. This is very clever, but also very time-consuming. Google Chrome OS is derived from Gentoo. In early 2002, Arch Linux was released, devised as a minimalist distro, where the user does much of the installation work to create an OS with just the parts required. This DIY approach was partly why Arch is renowned for its amazing documentation and for rolling out the earliest release of new versions of software.
At the height of the distro madness (around 2010), there were almost 300 Linux distros, we’d argue an unsustainable number, with many just repeating basic desktop functionality already available in core root distros. Progressing into the 2000s, and with increasing complexity in maintaining a modern OS, the number of Linux distros started to reduce, but that didn’t stop well-organised groups creating popular new distro forks when they felt a need.
A good example is Raspberry Pi OS, a rebrand of Raspbian, itself a fork of Debian. The new Arm-based hardware platform needed a dedicated operating system, so picking up Debian and refitting it for the Raspberry Pi, including educational software, libraries for its GPIO access, and tailored tools to configure its hardware, made absolute sense.
Linux hardware specialist System76 was tired of niggling software issues associated with using other distros, and wanted direct control. So, it introduced Pop!_OS, a fork of Ubuntu, to not only directly support its laptops and desktop hardware, but also its customers’ needs. It’s a slick, modern distro, with support for popular software and hardware.
Linux Mint started in 2006 as a small personal Ubuntu fork project. When Ubuntu changed to its “modern” Unity desktop design in 2011, many users revolted. The Linux Mint project created its own “classic” desktop, called Cinnamon, in 2012, and it brought many former Ubuntu users with it. The Linux
Mint project has stuck with its “user first” design approach, and evolved remarkably well.
This doesn’t even touch upon commercially focused distros, such as Android, Chrome OS, Intel’s ClearOS, Google’s Wear OS, Sailfish OS, and the host of serverspecific distros. Even today, there are well over 200 active Linux distros, and they’re as diverse, interesting, and wonderful as the communities that use them.
Looking forward
But what of the future? Technology predictions are notoriously tricky, but why would we ever let that stop us? Will Tux still be active in 30 years? We’d say that’s a safe bet: even if all development stopped now, people would keep on using it for years if not for decades. There are retro computer systems that are still ticking over almost as long later, and the Linux kernel is far more functional than they ever were.
A more likely scenario is Google, as an example, moving to an alternative kernel – Fuschia, say – though this would likely just be for Android and its IoT devices. Yet even if Google moved literally everything it runs to Fuschia, the Linux kernel is used so widely elsewhere that it would just keep on trucking.
As we’ve seen, the Linux world is larger than just its kernel. An OS is a whole ecosystem of interconnected systems that have to be developed, tested and packaged in an orchestrated manner. Linux was built on GNU tools and its licence; this widened the appeal of Linux and enabled the kernel with suitable distros to be deployed in such vastly differing devices, from the fastest super computer in the world to a lowly $4 Pi.
The Linux kernel isn’t tied to the success of any one corporation. Sure, there’s the Linux Foundation and Torvalds himself, but succession has already been put into place to keep kernel development going if Torvalds should step down. And while the Linux Foundation isn’t necessary, it’s certainly handy to orchestrate and handle funding and trademarks.
Put all of that aside, the reason Linux has succeeded is that it’s damn good at its job and everyone can contribute. It’s the single greatest software development project of modern times, which doesn’t mean it’s perfect – it’s software after all – but it’s continually improved and enhanced, it’s strong copyleft open source, it fostered a fabulous community and it’s given us all endless opportunities. So keep on enjoying it!