When you consider other factors, like number of software packages available, ease of instalation, documentation, and a large community of knowledgeable & helpful users, RedHat Linux stands out. It also uses something called Redhat Package Managment to make it easy to install applications. A few other Linux distributions such as Mandrake have adopted the RPM system as well. Others like Debian uses its own DEB package management system, but you can still use RPMs after installing an application to handle them.

The typical way to get and install these operating systems is to download one or more ISO files, burn them to a CD and boot from one of them. Debian offers an alternate method of downloading several floppy disk images, putting the images on actual floppy disks, booting from one, establishing a network connection then select the rest to be downloaded and installed. This approach can be quite handy when the CD burner is acting up, or for use in recovering a botched system, even a non-Debian one.