Pardus is a Linux distribution developed with support from the government of Turkey. Pardus' main focus is office-related work including use in Turkish government agencies. Despite that, Pardus ships in several languages. Its ease of use and availability free of charge has spawned numerous communities throughout the world.

Pardus was started by Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), a division of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK), in 2003.

The first live CD version of Pardus was a fork of Gentoo Linux in 2005. The current version is a fork of Debian unstable, following a release process similar to that of Ubuntu.

PiSi (/ˈpiːsiː/; Packages Installed Successfully as Intended; also a Turkish word meaning "kitty", intended as a pun on the distribution's name, which is derived from pardus, the species name of the leopard.) is a package management system that was developed for Pardus. It was used in the initial versions of the distribution, but abandoned in favor of APT since the project moved to Debian base. Pardus 2011.2, released on September 19, 2011, was the last Pardus release that used PiSi.

PiSi stores and handles dependencies for various packages, libraries, and COMAR tasks. Some features of PiSi include:^{[citation needed]}

A community fork of the old Pardus with PiSi package management exists, called PiSi Linux. PiSi Linux's latest stable version is 2.3.4.

eopkg - the package manager of the Solus project, a rolling-release Linux distribution, is based on / derived from PiSi.

YALI (Yet Another Linux Installer) is the first Pardus software a user encounters. Basically, it recognizes the hardware and installs Pardus software from installation media (i.e. CD) to a user-selected hard disk partition. YALI can handle resizing of NTFS partitions found on the disk. A yalı is a waterside mansion common in the Bosphorus region.