What is Linux and why it’s so popular and free?

Ibrahim Zaman
2 min readNov 4, 2023

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Linux, ah you heard that name before right even if you have not heard before, that’s okay. In this article/story, we will discuss Linux, it’s history and other popular stuff that you need to know right now. Let’s dive in (:

Ibrahim Zaman aka Mr Tux (@abrahimzaman360)
Bing Dall-E generated image.

What is Linux?

Linux is nothing but a living kernel that is running your android phone if you own or the server that sends you web pages while you browse phone. If you have question even about kernel? kernel is just a heart of any operating system that is middleman between your hardware (that you can touch) and the software (what you see in screen), so simple ha. of course!

Common misconception is Linux is an operating system (OS), no it’s not OS but it is main part of OS. So, then what really is Linux OS? we generally say Linux OS but in reality, it’s not. but as a convention it’s an OS. When we add system applications along with Linux Kernal it will become Linux OS in reality, where distro game is starting. What is Distro? because Linux is free and open-source, people build their own system application wrapped over Linux kernel and name is distro blah blah etc. like Ubuntu (son of Debian), Manjaro (son of Arch) etc.

History and Author:

Linux is actually Unix based itself, and created by a genius guy named as: Linus Torvalds and released its first version in Sep, 1991. Since, then Linux Kernel is open-source and thousands of people contributed on its main code specially many Organizations and Big-Tech companies like Google (for android), Microsoft (for WSL) etc.

Linux popularity but not on Desktop:

The main reason behind its popularity is being open-source and free, you can build whatever you want on top of it and name the product whatever you want with GNU license (which means you have to be agree with some conditions but copying and distribution will be free). The major area which Linux covers is servers and nowadays machine learning/deep learning etc.

# Apologies: I’ll continue writing it, I’m little tired (:

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