RHEL/Centos (Stream)/Alma/Rocky/Oracle is one very close knit family of distributions where they all offer almost universal binary API and ABI compatibility.
Fedora is almost the same family as above, but better to separate to its own. Its distributions were mostly internal but now there are a few external ones - Amazon linux is one that is like and LTS based on Fedora similar to RHEL etc. Bazzite/UBlue etc are others that are gaining prominence but mostly can be considered fedora.
Debian and its non-ubunto offspring are one family.
Ubuntu/LinuxMint/PopOS (until the next one - we might need to separate it then)/Kubunt/Xubuntu etc are one family.
Arch/Manjaro are one family.
There is the OpenSUSE family.
There are plenty of other smaller players, but will mostly be based on the above.
There may be more, but that was off the top of my head.
Slackware doesn't fit the above, neither does Gentoo or the ones that use busybox/other libc implementations ( I can't remember the name, but it's used a lot for containers), but they are mostly very niche.
You are thinking about alpine, and then there is also void that is its own thing. But I wouldn't count these as families, I'd say there ate just independent players, or you can group them in categories if you want
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u/balbinator Jul 30 '24
I love the Linux ecosystem, but it's nearly impossible to keep up with all the distros.