Linux history
origin
Linux began in 1991 with Finnish graduate student Linus Torvalds working to extend Minix, a small UNIX-like system developed for teaching.
distributed development
- kernel from Torvalds et. al.
- libraries and utilities (usually GNU)
- applications from other parties
- packaging from distribution maintainers
some differences between distributions
- installation and administration
- automatic, guided manual, manual; text or GUI
- init system
- systemd, SysV, RC, OpenRC, runit, S6, dinit
- C libraries and utilities
- glibc, musl, Bionic (Android); GNU coreutils, busybox, uutils
- components anywhere from unmodified to heavily customized
- package management
- automatic, manual, source
- GUI
- full desktop, lightweight desktop, window manager only, none
- release model
- rolling, semi-rolling, fixed, long term support
some major distributions
- Slackware
- 1993, UNIX-like
- Debian
- 1993, base of many other distros, democratic management
- SUSE
- 1994, commercial variants, general purpose, full featured
- Red Hat/Fedora
- 1994, commercial variants, server oriented
- Gentoo
- 1999, source based, (semi) rolling release, extremely configurable
- Ubunu
- 2004, related to Debian, desktop oriented, many descendants
- Arch
- 2006, rolling release, many descendants
some minor but interesting (to me) distributions
- NixOS
- 2003, declarative package manager, non-traditional directory structure
- Alpine
- 2005, small, busybox, OpenRC init system
- Void
- 2008, small, semi-rolling release, runit init system, glibc or musl libc
- Qubes
- 2012, security oriented, runs VMs on Xen hypervisor
- Chimera
- 2021, no GNU components (musl libc, LLVM toolchain, FreeBSD core tools, dinit init system)
some special-purpose distributions
- OpenWrt
- 2004, routers
- Android
- 2008, touchscreen
- ChromeOS
- 2011, browser oriented
- IPFire
- 2015, firewall/router
licensing
- mostly GPL license
- copyleft
what Linux is for
- servers
- web, email, etc.
- compute servers
- network attached storage
- high performance computers
- supercomputers
- workstations
- small/embedded computers
- mobile devices
- routers/firewalls
- IOT devices
- automobiles
- Chromebooks and other low-cost devices
- single board hobby machines
- desktops
- not so much, only for hardcore users