Linux

From ArticleWorld

Linux is an open-source computer operating system aimed at being a general-purpose, free and powerful operating system. Its development started as a simple hobby project of Linus Torvalds, but in time it grew up to being the main alternative to proprietary operating systems like Linux. Although it was originally designed for x86 processors, it has been ported to many other architectures, including x86_64, sparc, arm, m68k and even some embedded architectures. It is licensed under GPL, although some have suggested that it might be a better choice to change this to a BSD-style license.

The development effort of a Linux distribution is significant, and the fact that it has been so quick can only be explained by the open-source nature of the kernel and the applications. The Debian Project estimated that, if the Debian GNU/Linux distribution version 2.2 had been developed by proprietary means, it would have cost almost 2 billion USD.

Distributions

Linux is only developed as kernel. Therefore, in order to turn it to a full-fledged operating systems, various individuals, groups and companies decided to pack various userland applications around the Linux kernel. Such a package is known as a Linux distributions. At the time of writing, several hundreds of distributions exist, from general-purpose to specialized distributions, aimed at servers, small systems, embedded systems and so on.

Linux is widely used for web hosting purposes. In fact, there is a special name for some web hosting systems: LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python).

Userbase

Much of Linux' userbase used to be made out of users with strong computer skills, which is partly explainable by the fact that Linux itself is a Unix-like operating system. This has been changing lately though, as the distributions began to be more and more user friendly, and the multimedia capabilities of Linux have turned it into a capable desktop operating system.

The market share itself has grown up explosively after 2002. Many servers were already running Linux at that time (an estimated of 25%), but few computers were using it as a desktop system. However, with the improvement of the hardware support (although there is still room for improvement) and application software, Linux is becoming a main player in the desktop operating systems world.