Explore the new worlds

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words. This picture has a 1000 branches to different linux distributions  (Will... Maybe close to it) you can see all of the different branches on ending on the right side of the picture. And none of these distros run using windows.

Note:  The words in the picture are hard to see. If you are using google chrome , you can use the ALT + key to make the words larger.  But it is still not clear to read. I reduced the original by 66% so as the not have a huge picture file on the inter net. You will find the original here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution

CD ROM verses USB drives

The normal install for most all of these distros, was to erase windows off of the hard drive and replace it with one of the linux distros systems. Almost no one wanted to give up their windows in trade for a linux system. So this plan did not pan out very will. A work around was needed so that many other distros could show their stuff. Duel booting was setup so as to share the hard drive with two different systems. But again one would have to reinstall windows to one half of the drive and linux onto the other half. This was some better but way to much work for most people. One could add a second drive and put the distro on that drive. But you would still have to set up a duel boot system. The Master Boot Record would get corrupted from time to time, leaving windows tonally dead .

Then there is the CD ROM drive, it could be used to boot the distro. But the CD rom drives are Read Only Memoy. (ROM) .Putting the most important files into RAM workes OK. But this setup is slow in accessing the  the CD ROM when needed, and so it is still not a fare comparison to the speed of the hard drives.

So maybe the USB Drive to the rescue.