UNetbootin writes Linux distributions onto a USB stick. It carries a built in list of 29 distributions and 12 system rescue tools, accepts an ISO you already have, and ships a separate installer for each of three platforms.

A Chinese-flavoured edition of Ubuntu led by Kylinsoft, running its own UKUI desktop, with version 26.04 released in April 2026 on the Linux 7.0 kernel, images and checksums published on the official site and three years of support behind it.

A community continuation of the classic minimal distribution, pairing the Openbox window manager with panels and monitors so an idle desktop uses a few hundred megabytes, configuration finished out of the box and old machines welcome.

An assessment platform that arrives ready to work: hundreds of tools sorted by purpose, a rolling toolchain, and images for virtual machines, containers and cloud, free and open source.

The panel is at the bottom, the menu is bottom left, and the file manager looks familiar on purpose. A driver manager and an updater remove the two hardest questions, and the live session lets you try before installing.

Picking a server system usually means choosing between chasing the newest kernel and keeping a conservative base. CentOS Stream resolves that tension by publishing what the next enterprise minor release will contain, months before it lands, and letting anyone run it.

Rocky Linux is a community rebuild of the enterprise Linux line: bug for bug compatible with upstream, around ten years of updates per major release, governed by a nonprofit, and free to use on production servers.

BlackArch Linux is a security research distribution on an Arch base with 2865 tools in its repositories, and it can be added to an existing Arch install instead of replacing it.

Xubuntu is the Ubuntu variant built on the Xfce desktop, and its 26.04 long-term release stays patched into 2029. It carries an image editor and an office suite out of the box, asks little of the hardware, and installs exactly the way Ubuntu does.

Manjaro is a desktop Linux distribution built on Arch. It wraps the parts Arch leaves to experience - a graphical installer, graphical software management, a tool for hardware drivers - and keeps the rolling repositories underneath, so a machine can keep updating without a reinstall.

Bodhi Linux is a lightweight distribution on the Ubuntu long-term support base that installs a very small set of tools and leaves the rest to you. Its own Moksha desktop is modular, the official minimum is 1GB of memory and 10GB of disk, and only 64-bit images are offered from the 8 series onward.

deepin is a desktop Linux distribution maintained by its own community since 2008. Version 25 brings the Solid immutable design with snapshots and rollback, a cross-distribution package format, a rebuilt DDE written in QML, a self-developed window compositor and AI helpers woven through the system.

Peppermint OS is a lightweight Linux distribution for old and low-spec machines, with Xfce as its desktop. It ships two build lines, one on Debian and one on Devuan, and the Devuan line lets the installer choose SysVinit, OpenRC or runit instead of systemd.

A major release every six months, and always the one to try things first. This time GNOME 49 arrives on the desktop, the workstation edition drops the X11 session altogether and runs Wayland alone, and triple buffering makes the animation smoother. The toolchain was renewed in one sweep, with the package manager, the compilers and the language runtimes all moving forward together. Anyone who wants a read only system with isolated applications still has the atomic desktops.

A community distribution steered by a non profit foundation: binary compatible with the commercial enterprise system it follows and free of charge for good. The 10 line brings Btrfs, keeps the older x86-64-v2 architecture alive and turns on post quantum cryptography by default, with images from embedded boards up to mainframes, RISC-V included.