We report on the state of the art in the formal specification and analysis of concurrent systems whose activity duration depends on general probability distributions. First of all the basic notions and results introduced in the literature are explained and, on this basis, a conceptual classification of the different approaches is presented. We observe that most of the approaches agree on the fact that the specification of systems with general distributions has a three level structure: the process algebra level, the level of symbolic semantics and the level of concrete semantics. Based on such observations, a new very expressive model is introduced for representing timed systems with general distributions. We show that many of the approaches in the literature can be mapped into this model establishing therefore a formal framework to compare these approaches.