For example, Manjaro includes an application for installing proprietary drivers (a must for anyone that owns an Nvidia graphics card). Other popular applications, like Firefox, are pre-installed as well. The distro is available in several different official and community-supported flavours, each with different desktop environments. All linux network engineer versions are replete with all the regular desktop apps and also ship with several custom apps to ease various administrative tasks. The distro is easy to install and can be easily managed through its intuitive browser-based administration interface. What is more, Linux Mint is an open-source distro that supports x86 and x64 platforms.

• For developers in that group, I recommend the newest version of Ubuntu.
• In the future, CentOS Stream is likely to become the best option for anyone seeking an RHEL-adjacent distribution.
• For example, instead of LibreOffice for your default office suite or Thunderbird for your e-mail client, neither one is provided by default.
• Manjaro is an Arch Based Linux distribution and is one of the best ones suited to be your daily driver.
• If you have an older computer, you can use the Lite edition that is designed for underpowered machines.
• Arista boxes and now Nexus 9Ks give you access to a bash shell, not just the config shell.

Suppose you are moving to Linux for the first time or deploying Linux to people who are not familiar with it. In that case, System 76’s Pop OS is the best Linux distro for you. Pop OS was initially made by System 76 for their open-source line of computer hardware. Because System 76 adheres to an open-source philosophy, their Pop OS is also freely available.

Linux Lite

The project is about to merge with Funtoo, which is led by the original creator of Gentoo Linux. The distro advertises its use as an ideal environment for developers. The Solus project website also claims that the OS supports a number of programming languages such as Go, Rust, PHP, Node.js and Ruby. Solus is special in that it’s one of the few Irish Linux distros, and also because it follows a curated rolling release model.

BackTrack changed its name to Kali in 2013 after this Linux distro was re-based around Debian instead of Ubuntu. I have seen quite a few linux certification programs but am wondering what is valued what isnt. With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.

Arch Linux/Manjaro Linux

The distro is based on the Ubuntu LTS release (in this case 22.04) and sports its own user interface over GNOME, called Pop Shell. If you have an older computer, you can use the Lite edition that is designed for underpowered machines. The Education edition is, as its name suggests, designed for learning and ships with all the popular open source educational apps and utilities. The best Linux distros offer stability and security in a Linux environment, but there are many different types and flavors according to different needs. Here we’ll help you find the one you for you, regardless as to whether you’re a beginner or advanced user. To use Elementary OS effectively, you need a system with 4 GB of RAM, a dual-core 64-bit processor, and 15 GB of hard disk space.

As its developers say, » You’re the installer.» That means, «you can apply all the customizations you desire» — once that is, you’ve absorbed the Gentoo Handbook. Unless you’re an expert Gentoo user, I urge you to keep a copy of the Handbook up and running on another computer. You’re going to need all the help you can get to get Gentoo up and running. The Fedora Developer Portal also comes with an excellent guide for developing hardware devices such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi. The distro is available in several different editions, each with a different desktop environment, and most weigh around 300 MB.

The best Linux distros of 2023 in full:

Then through the Red Hats, Fedora Core, and then Fedora I got tired of upgrading every 6 months or so, on several machines and settled on an LTS distro. I’ve flirted with many distros over the last 20 years, but few have remained on the hard drive as daily drivers. But MX Linux has proved reliable over the last 6 months or so and I can’t see myself changing it.

Its minimum system requirements include 4 GB of RAM, 100 GB of disk space, and a 1024×768 screen resolution. Also, you do not have to install it separately, as you can run it live from a USB drive or DVD. If you go to their official page, you will quickly see them offering two versions.

What is the Best Linux Distribution for Pentesting and Security?

As it is intended to be the downstream of RHEL, it is fully compatible with a lot of Red Hat software. Get ready with one of these options and in the next post we’ll talk how to access your Linux box remotely and without a password (but securely) with ssh. On our side, we’ll do our best to give a smooth but solid introduction to Linux for network https://remotemode.net/ engineers. Linux and coding are becoming very valuable skills for network engineers that want to expand their horizons in new areas such as SDN, network automation, and DevOps. You should test out software like Nmap and familiarize yourself with networking on your new Linux distro so that lack of familiarity doesn’t become an obstacle later on.