This video shows that Linux can do the basic things people use a computer for like, accessing the internet, using a spreadsheet, listening to music, and watching videos. Three different Linux desktops all using the Ubuntu Linux operating systems shows that using a different desktop can provide different user experiences.

In this video tutorial we say that a distro is short for distribution and give an oversimplified explanation of distro. The oversimplified explanation of a distro is that is it made up of 3 things, the kernel, operating system, and desktop. That the kernel translates computer commands into 1s and 0s, the operating system keeps track of what programs are running, what is in memory, and allows the computer to interact with the user (with text commands only); and the desktop is the nice graphical user interface that allows us to use the mouse to point and click computer commands.

The two people most responsible for making Linux what is is today are Linux Torvalds the creator of the Linux kernel and Richard Stallman from the GNU Project that developed many subroutines and libraries that are still used in Linux distros today. Richard Stallman also promoted the idea of having all source code available to everyone and that it be released under a license that would allow anyone to make changes to the code and release it under a different name. We look at a Linux timeline and see that Debian came before Ubuntu and that the people at Ubuntu took the Debian code, made some changes and released it as Ubuntu, then the people at Mint took the Ubuntu code made some changes and released it as Linux Mint. We then conclude that Linux Mint is really Debian-Ubuntu-GNU-Linux-Mint; but we just call it Mint. Many Linux distributions are designed for a specific need or area of interest.

We end by looking at Distrowatch.com and picking Linux Mint as the distro to be used for this tutorial series because it is designed for beginners and it has a high ranking on distrowatch.com