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A complete Linux system package is called a distribution. A Linux distribution contains the Linux kernel, the GNU project's tools, and any number of open source software projects to provide various functionality for the system.

Lots of different Linux distributions are available to meet just about any computing requirement you could have. Most distributions are customized for a specific user group, such as business users, multimedia enthusiasts, software developers, or normal home users.

Each customized distribution includes the software packages required to support specialized functions, such as audio and video editing software for multimedia enthusiasts, or compilers and integrated development environments (IDEs) for software developers.

The different Linux distributions are often divided into three categories:

 Full core Linux distributions

 Specialized distributions

 Live test distributions

The following sections describe these different types of Linux distributions, and shows some examples of Linux distributions in each category.