Installation media and mechanisms
For anchoring them to your disks.
In terms of installation options, Slackware covers the basics, but doesn’t go as far as the others. The project, which is fuelled by old-school community passion, rather than money, produces 32-bit and 64-bit install-only DVD images, as well as a live edition that’s only available for 64-bit machines. There’s also the Slackware ARM project that puts out 32-bit and 64-bit stable releases for ARM processors.
Debian, which recommends the minimal netinst for 64-bit PCs, also puts out other images, such as offline installers, live systems, installers for other CPU architectures, such as 32-bit PCs, or cloud instances for popular platforms such as OpenStack, Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.
Fedora has several editions. There’s a workstation release for laptops and desktops, and another for server and IoT deployments. The project also releases cloud images for creating VMs, for deployment using Vagrant, along with images for GCP and Amazon Web Services. There’s also CoreOS, an automatically updating, minimal, container-focused release. Finally, there’s Silverblue, the latest addition, an immutable desktop operating system for container-focused workflows.
OpenSUSE has two broad editions: a rolling release called Tumbleweed and a regular release named Leap. Tumbleweed and Leap both have images for 32-bit and 64-bit PCs as well as other platforms such as ARM64, PowerPC, IBM zSystems and LinuxONE. Both also have minimal VM images for KVM and Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware, along with several live images with different desktop environments for 64-bit PCs and ARM64; Tumbleweed also sports live images for 32-bit PCs. You can also install Leap on public cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure. There’s a new MicroOS release for container-specific workloads that can be used in VMs running on Xen or KVM, or on SoCs like the Pi.
Lastly there’s Ubuntu, which produces a long-term support (LTS) in addition to regular desktop and server releases for 64-bit PCs. Then there’s Ubuntu for IoT for various SoCs including the Raspberry Pi, Intel NUC and virtualisation platforms like KVM. You can even get Ubuntu installers for multiple RISC-V platforms including SiFive Unmatched and StarFive VisionFive.