First published in 1971, Unix was entirely written in assembly language, as was the basic practice at the time. The Unix-based operating system was implemented and conceived in 1969 at AT&T's Bell labs by Joe Ossanna, Douglas Mcllroy, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson in the United States. For example, the Linux kernel is licensed upon the GPLv2.

The source code may be distributed, modified, and used non-commercially or commercially by everyone under the conditions of its respective licenses, like the GNU GPL (General Public License). Linux is one of the most outstanding examples of open-source and free software collaboration. It includes spacecraft (Perseverance rover, Dragon crew capsule, and Falcon 9 rocket), automobiles (Toyota, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and Tesla), televisions (LG and Samsung Smart TVs), video game consoles, smart home devices, automation controls, and routers.Also, Linux executes on many embedded systems, i.e., devices whose OS is typically designed into the firmware and is extremely customized to the system.However, Linux is used by just around 2.6% of desktop computers as of November 2022.Including Android, Linux has the biggest installed base of every general-purpose operating system because of the control of the Linux-based Android over smartphones as of May 2022.Originally, Linux was designed for personal computers that were Intel x86 architecture-based, but it has since been moved to more environments than other operating systems.Desktop distributions of Linux are windowing systems like Wayland or X11 and desktop environments like KDE Plasma and GNOME.

Commercial distributions are SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Several Linux distributions use the term 'Linux' in the title, but the Free Software Foundation uses the 'GNU/Linux' title to focus on the necessity of GNU software, causing a few controversies.įamous Linux distributions are Ubuntu, Fedora Linux, and Debian, the latter of which is composed of several different modifications and distributions, including Xubuntu and Lubuntu. Typically, Linux is packaged as the Linux distribution, which contains the supporting libraries and system software and kernel, several of which are offered by the GNU Project. Linux is an open-source Unix-like operating system-based family on the Linux kernel, and the OS kernel was first published on 17 September 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Next → ← prev What is Linux Operating System? Introduction to Linux

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