After this exercise in experiencing the creation and configuration of various Linux distros using VMWare Workstation to spin up virtual machines, I have a few takeaways.

The difference between similar distros is basically unrecognisable in some cases. If you’re creating a VM to run a service, then it doesn’t really matter what distro you pick, as long as the one you pick is supported or recommended and if it doesn’t need a GUI, can run as a minimal install. Personally, I will always use Centos minimal because that’s what I use at work. If it works, it works, really.

Networking is pretty straight forward, albeit not intuitive when you don’t know how to to do it. If you know the steps, then it’s easy. If you don’t know how to even start, you can find yourself looking at different methods online which collectively confuse you, so unless there’s a requirement in an organisation to use one method over the other, just do what you know, I guess.

There are too many Linux distros over too many branches to learn, and you probably don’t need to learn a lot of them, just the ones you’re going to actually use. You might want to learn Arch Linux because you just want the challenge, but if you don’t want to learn it and don’t have to, then don’t. Like the look of Ubuntu but someone else uses Fedora and swears by it? Use Ubuntu or learn Fedora – there are enough distros to keep you busy.

My laptop is Linux Mint. I like it, it’s similar to Windows. My laptop isn’t the most high-tech piece of kit ever refurbished so a lite Linux like Mint Xfce works well for keeping my laptop under boiling-point. SQL instances and services work well using Centos minimal so I’ll generally just default to using that. There are so many flavours of Linux with so many overlapping features and methods of operating the system that it just really comes down to: What do you need to use? What do you want to use? What do you like? Have fun with it.