The linux facts

The best linux distro to install on hard disk is Linux Mint for desktop purposes.

For web server and programming, try to install Centos Linux.

If you want only web server based on LAMP, try Turnkey Lamp distro.

Linux and Unix philosophies:

• All files are just streams of bytes.
• All devices behave much like files.
• All directories are also files (this is no longer strictly true).
• Each program does one small job VERY well.
• The “shell” provides powerful mechanisms like pipes and redirects that allow you to combine multiple commands into a single step.
• The shell is just another program…nothing special.
• Users on the system are protected from each other.

Other flavor of linux:

http://www.slackel.gr/forum/about.htm

https://www.salixos.org/

http://vectorlinux.com/