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ELI5: What the heck is linux?
(lazysoci.al)
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this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Your computer is a bunch of parts that need software to make them work. The "operating system" handles talking to the hardware directly, while the programs you run only talk to the operating system. Talking to the operating system is easy, talking to the hardware is difficult, since you may need to speak a hundred different languages to work with every possible network card, sound card, graphics card, etc.
The operating systems you have probably heard of are windows and macOS. Linux is a 3rd one.
Windows is owned by Microsoft, macOS is owned by Apple, and Linux is developed by the community and (typically) released for free. Since anyone can work on Linux, there are tons of different versions of it floating around, that are all slightly different from one another.
Omg this us an amazing explanation thanks
Fun fact: Android is one of those Linux variants. It is, however, so highly modified, that we usually don't really call it 'Linux' anymore. But the core components of Android are most certainly Linux components. So in a pedantic way, way more people directly use Linux than you would think.
There's pretty much three core OSes out there:
Amost everything else is just a variation of these.
Android, ChromeOS, PS3 OS, tons of embedded systems like car entertainment systems, and of course all the traditional Linux distros like Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, Fedora, and so on are Linux.
MacOS, iOS, Switch OS, pfSense and tons of embedded systems like routers, and of course all the traditional BSD distros like FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD and so on are BSD based. (Though Switch OS, to be fair, is mostly it's own thing, only borrowing significant portions from BSD.)
4/10. No mention of TempleOS.
Nah, this is a really good explanation.
Dude may have been nuts, but he did do something quite impressive for his time.
TempleOS is not Linux!
Have you heard of Stallman's new project TNL?