What actually means Distro? It’s not in the dictionary…

Asked By Patricia C Lahr 20 points N/A Posted on - 02/10/2015

'There are many Linux Distros'. I've seen this sentence many times on the webpages but what actually is a distro? I have tried to search it on dictionary but I didn't find it. Is it a software distribution or package. Anyways, I want to be clear how distro got its name. 

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Answered By Sharath Reddy 590495 points N/A #192563

What actually means Distro? It’s not in the dictionary…

The word or term “distro” is the short term used for “distribution”. It is the term used to describe a particular distribution of Linux like for example Red Hat, SuSe, and Debian. It is built or the distribution is created from the usual Linux operating system. In the world of Linux, there are different flavors of distro.

As I mentioned above, Red Hat, SuSe, and Debian are among the flavors of distro including Ubuntu. Technically speaking, a distribution does not specifically point to Linux. A distribution or a distro is any deployment of software. So, that puts Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X as distros. Though distro is just a term used for the deployment of software, it is mostly used in Linux context.

That’s why since distro is often mentioned or used in Linux, it always refers to a flavor of Linux.

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• Posted on - 02/18/2015
• Question Category: Linux Distributions