We characterize distributional chaos for linear operators on Fréchet spaces in terms of a computable condition (DCC), and also as the existence of distributionally irregular vectors. A sufficient condition for the existence of dense uniformly distributionally irregular manifolds is presented, which is very general and can be applied to many classes of operators. Distributional chaos is also analyzed in connection with frequent hypercyclicity, and the particular cases of weighted shifts and composition operators are given as an illustration of the previous results.