It's a fact that there are literally hundreds of Linux distributions available. Most are free, but there are others for which you must pay. Many of the free Linux vendors also offer enterprise Linux versions that are stable, tested, and offer support. Obviously, for the purposes of this book, it would be impossible to detail the MongoDB installation process on every single distribution. Instead, we will concentrate on two main families of Linux: the RPM- (formerly RedHat Package Manager: https://rpm.org/) based and the Debian-based distributions.
Of the RPM-based distributions, we find RedHat, Fedora, and CentOS, among others, which are extremely popular. On the Debian side, we have Kali Linux and Ubuntu (and its offshoots!). There are many other distributions—and even other major families—that are not covered in this book. Among the more well-known distributions not covered are SUSE, pacman, Gentoo, and Slackware.
