OS Types

There are actually quite a few different OS types. Some examples of operating system types would be mobile devices — your mobile device has a certain operating system that it's on there. We also have operating systems that go on desktops, laptops and workstations. There are some operating systems that are built just specifically for being a server. Then we have embedded operating systems. There's also other operating systems out there; for instance, Cisco calls their operating system for their switches a network operating system, or a NOS.

Workstation operating systems

What I'm on here is a Dell laptop, and I can click the start button and type in about my PC, or about your PC, and we can see that this has a Windows 10 Pro on it. So Windows 10 Pro, which is actually a little outdated at this point — Windows 11 is out — but Windows 10 Pro is an example of an operating system that I have on this laptop, I have it on my desktop, and so it gets installed on a lot of different things. So this is an example of an operating system that gets installed on all those workstations.

There are different companies that have made operating systems out there. To give you some ideas of the different operating systems and how much of the market, during the time of this recording we have Windows taking up 72% of the market. So if you were to take a look at 100 machines out there, chances are 72 of those machines are Windows machines — that's Microsoft Windows. We have Apple with their Mac OS; Mac OS takes up 15% of the market. We have Linux, which is 4% of the market, and Chrome OS, which is 2% of the market.

Mobile operating systems

Here's an example of a mobile device. On the mobile device we usually use our finger to navigate around to the different windows and open things up. That right there, this is an iPhone, but a lot of the other ones are similar, where we use our finger to navigate around and we interact with these different icons.

This is a little bit older stat for mobile devices, but it gives us an idea; it hasn't changed drastically at the time of this recording. Android takes up 71% of the market of mobile OSes, and Apple's iOS takes up 28%, and then 1% other. So we can see it really is divided between Apple's iOS and Android.

Server operating systems

This is a Microsoft Windows server, and what we can see is it looks and feels very similar to their workstation, something you'd find on a desktop or laptop. If we click on the menu item here, we can see that there are some similarities, but there's also some differences. Some of the stuff that's installed, like this Server Manager, is installed on this server, and then we can manage the server aspect of it. So it's very similar, although it's really geared to be more of a server rather than a workstation like a desktop or a laptop.

Let's see some stats on public servers. This is an older stat, but it really hasn't changed drastically over the last 10 years or so, and what we see is that about 80% of the servers that are out there are Linux or Unix-like systems, and then we have a 20% that is Microsoft Windows-based systems.

Embedded operating systems

Now, some of our IoT devices — like this is an Echo Dot — may have some sort of firmware or embedded operating system on it, and so there's code on here that runs these things. So there is another type of operating system, and that is these embedded operating systems. The difference is that it's really kind of specialized code for these different devices. You wouldn't really take the software that you put on this Echo Dot and put it on other devices, because it's very specific to these types of devices.

Network operating systems

So we have devices on our network like switches, we have routers, we have firewalls, we have these different devices that interconnect our devices together and allow them to speak out to the internet or with each other. And there are operating systems that are especially designed to run this type of equipment. An example of this would be like Cisco's IOS. This would be the operating system that would run these and keep them up and running and carry out the functions of a switch or router or whatever it's on.

Here I jumped on one of the Cisco Catalyst switches, and so this is an example of a network operating system that you'd find on a switch or router or firewall. What I can do is I can type in some commands in here to show you different things, like maybe I want to do a show IP interface brief. This is going to show you all of the interfaces that are on this switch, and we can see that there's quite a few, and we can see the status of them, we can see if they have IP addresses assigned to them. So we see different information on this switch.

I would be able to navigate through this switch, so I can do configure terminal and get into the config mode right here, or if I want to get into one of the interfaces I would type in interface GI one1 0 1 and hit enter. Now I'm in this interface right here, so I can jump in and out of these different modes and be able to navigate this. But it's all text based — or at least this particular one; not all of them, not all network operating systems are text based, but this one is in particular. So this is managing a switch that interconnects a bunch of different devices together, and this is the operating system on there.

If I wanted to show you what version that is, what I could do is I could do a show versions and hit enter here, and this is going to show me details, in which one of the cases I can see the version of OS this is. So this is version 12 here, and then we see some other information that's captured in here as well. Oh, actually, there's the version, 12.12. So we see some information in here about this network operating system.