Parabola strives to keep its packaging and management tools as simple as possible, so that users have plenty of flexibility to install and configure the system to their liking. It's based on Arch, and provides instructions for current Arch users to migrate to Parabola and remove any nonfree software they might have installed. A small team of hackers has come together to build and maintain the distribution.

There are now nine different distributions included on our list. If you haven't already made the switch, check it out—with plenty of choices available, there's sure to be one that suits your needs and tastes.

All of the distributions follow the Free System Distribution Guidelines, which spell out a commitment to ensure that the distribution only ever includes or recommends free software. There's a lot of free software out there, and sometimes mistakes slip through the cracks. If you find nonfree software in one of these distributions, you can report it as a bug. Once the report is confirmed, we'll send you a GNU Buck as a token of our appreciation.