It would be very usefull as a starting point if I can get a comparison of the most used Linux distributions today.
What are the differences between them and what are they traditionally good at?
Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE comparison
fedoraopensuseUbuntu
Best Answer
Each distro has different strengths and different philosophies.
Ubuntu aims to be easy to use. They are based on Debian but adopt a slightly more pragmatic approach, as opposed to Debian, which is more pure in their quest for Freedom. Ubuntu has LTS releases which are supported for 3 years. I'd say that's a minimum req for anyone intending to use lots of installs. You don't want to upgrade your production machines' OSes every 6 months.
Fedora likes to be close to the cutting edge. Each Fedora release is similar to a Beta of RedHat's workstation/server product. Fedora releases every 6 months and each release is only supported until the next two releases are out. So you should plan to upgrade once a year to keep up with security releases. This is fine for a small number of non-critical machines, but I would avoid it on production servers unless you intend to take over security patch maintenance.
Given a choice between Fedora or Ubuntu, for production work, I'd be inclinded to choose a Ubuntu LTS release, for the 3 year support window. Given the choice of any Linux distro, most of the major vendors are fairly reliable; I'd be inclined to choose CentOS or RedHat because I'm familiar with Fedora/RedHat's configuration, having used it for 12 years now.