Okay, so here is my first article about linux, and it'll be a a very basic topic: What is linux? The reason why I'm writing this is pretty simple: Many people tell you something that is absolutly wrong!
Now, what is linux? Linux is not an operating system. It is,
technically, the kernel of the operating system. So what it does, can be described best as the doorway for your software to your hardware. With that being said, I may give you this example: If an application wants to save a file on the harddrive, it does not do this by accessing the disk by itself, but by passing the file to the kernel who then saves it. The same with loading a file, showing graphics, or even read an input from the keyboard. Everytime you do something with your hadware, the software has to use the kernel for this.
That was the part for technicians. For beginners, linux normally means the base operating system,
GNU/Linux. As you may guessed from the section above, you cannot do anything with the kernel by itself. It doesn't have a user interface, even a commandline interface is not available. So in order to get a minimal user experience, you'll need some basic tools, combien them and call it
GNU. Originally, GNU was meant to become it's own operating system, but they where missing a kernel (and they still are, but for those who are interested, look for GNU Hurd). Therefore, they combined the GNU tools with linux, and voila, we have an operating system. Now don't get to exited about this, because it only features a command line interface, a texteditor and many tools to get informations about the hardware. And you can also access your harddrive, yeah.
Then again, for us desktop users, this is still unusable. What we need, is a desktop environment, webbrower, e-mail client, instant messaging tool, office suite, a.s.o. You can get this in one package, and that would be a
Linux Distribution. This is the most used solution for our desktop pc, notebook and/or netbook. Here we have a huge selection, and every distribution has it's own pros and cons. But this is not what I want to talk about, because now I only want to tell you: Linux is not an operating system.
The reason for this is pretty simple: There is no standard for an operating system. You may define an OS as what Windows is, but that is only a desktop operating system. There are also OSs for smartphones, in-car computer, TV, DVD players, gaming consoles, microwaves, freezers and in the future your socks. The pretty awesome thing about this is, that GNU/linux runs on all these platforms. So what do you think, is this an operating system?
