What is Linux and why is it used?
In: Technology
To understand the answer, you have to know what an operating system is.
An operating system is like the software equivalent of an ecosystem / system of government / society.
A piece of software on your computer doesn’t talk *directly* to the screen and keyboard and mouse and disk drive. That would be anarchy, like some post-apocalyptic Mad Max hellscape, where everyone just takes what they can and to hell with everyone else.
Instead, it sends polite requests to the *operating system* to do things for it – and the operating system makes sure that those requests are safe and legal and fair to the other software using the computer.
It’s a bit like a restaurant: you don’t just barge straight into the kitchen, rummage in the fridge, fight over utensils, throw other pans off the stove, cook whatever you feel like then drag it out to the middle of the floor to eat it. That would be bad enough for *one* person to do, but if everyone did that, everyone would have a bad time.
Instead, there are rules and procedures and facilities. You make a reservation, to ensure there’s capacity. You wait at the front desk, acknowledge your reservation, and the waiter takes you to a table. When you get to the table, you’re given time to think, then they come back and ask you to pick a meal from the menu. The water goes away, hands your order to the chefs, who know how all the utensils and equipment are meant to be used, who have their own setup for sharing and maintaining them, who have portioned out the ingredients and scheduled the cooking, they cook your food and hand the finished plate to the waiter, who brings it back to your table. You eat, you pay, you leave, and they free up the table for the next person.
It’s civilised, it’s reliable, you don’t need to know how their stove works, you don’t even need to know how to cook at all.
In this model, the computer is the *physical* restaurant – the kitchen, the equipment, the dining room, etc. – and the operating system is the *business* that runs there – the staff and the whole system of running the place, designing the menu, ordering the ingredients, actually cooking, waiting on tables, and cleaning up after.
A different business could purchase the whole lot, and run a very, very different restaurant in it. Smokey Joes BBQ Firepit is going to be a very different set of services and procedures and expectations from a snooty french place, which will in turn be very different from a vegan commune where you pick your own mung beans.
And so the choice of operating system depends on what kind of software you’re using and what you want to do with it.
Windows is all about graphical applications – everything has a window, it pops up, you poke buttons on it, you close it. It’s great for big self-contained apps, but not really set up for tinkering, not really set up for chaining tools together, not (traditionally) great for running web servers or doing development work. It’s all very plastic-wrapped, all very finished-product. It’s like like living in a Daiso store.
Linux on the other hand, *is* good for all those things. There’s a wealth of ways for programs to talk to each other, there’s a plethora of small tools you can McGyver together, and there’s systems for managing gigantic workloads. It’s really very industrial, like a factory / workshop / petroleum refinery. Not so great for people who just want to *use* stuff, but excellent for people who need to create software and provide services.
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