I've been using Linux for several years, but never stepped beyond installing from a CD/DVD. If the app manager didn't have what I was looking for in the software, then I was a lost cause.
But right now I'm trying to get a grip around what "Linux" is.
The first word that pops into my head is "kernel". After reading on Wikipedia, I understand that a kernel is software running to give other software (OS + apps) access to hardware (CPU, RAM+++). It also handles memory, but isn't that what the OS is supposed to do (what I remember from OS class)?
Is the Linux distro just a packed list of software?
Take my favorite distro: Fedora. It's now in version 14 and ships with kernel 2.6.35.
Does the kernel come from somewhere central and is the core of every Linux distro? If this is true, then is the Linux distro just a way of making the computer with the kernel more user-friendly to use? In that way, the distro+kernel is the OS because the one without the other is not usable (maybe pure kernel, but who sits on that?).