Spins and derivatives
Can I pimp my ride?
Aderivative is a distro that is based on the work done in the upstream distro, but has its own identity, goals and audience. Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora are popular options for creating derivatives. There’s a number of distros based on Debian, including several that have gone on to become popular in their own niche, such as the pentesting distro Kali Linux, and the privacy and anonymity distro Tails. The most popular derivative by far, though, is Ubuntu, which has become a key Linux distro in itself.
The default desktop environment of Fedora is Gnome, but if you prefer an alternative desktop such as KDE or Xfce, you can download a spin for your preferred desktop environment. Then there’s Fedora Labs, which is a selection of curated bundles of purpose-driven software and content, such as Security, Games, Astronomy and such. They are curated and maintained by members of the Fedora community, and may be installed as standalone Fedora-based distros.
You’d imagine Slackware’s KISS principle would make it quite appealing to distro developers to use it as a base for their own. However, in reality, there are very few Slackware derivatives. Most of the derivatives, including Salix, Absolute Linux and Zenwalk, exist to turn Slackware into a ready-to-use desktop distro. Two of our favourite Slackware derivatives are Slax and Porteus, which are portable and modular live distros.
OpenSUSE isn’t a particularly popular base for derivatives. There are some, such as GeckoLinux and Gnome Next, but the list is fairly limited. The project had an online app for creating derivatives called SUSE Studio, but it was shuttered in 2018.