Linux is a free, open-source Unix-like operating system that emerged in the early 1990s and has since branched into hundreds of distributions tailored for different environments and use cases. This content covers its historical origins, the major distribution families, and a hands-on look at the Fedora and Ubuntu desktop environments.
Linux and Unix-like Systems
Here's the history of operating systems. What happened is, one of the first operating systems that became very popular was Unix, but you had to pay a lot of money for Unix. So people created their own operating systems that mimicked Unix. They took a lot of the Unix ideas and then created their own versions of it, so we call them Unix-like systems. And then what happened is these cost money as well, until the early 90s, when there were a couple of free versions that came out. But because there wasn't a free version available, Linux was created, which is a Unix-like system, but it was free and open. This became really the popular Unix-like system, and still is popular today.
The core of Linux really is that kernel, and there's a lot of people that put different front ends on this and then they call it by different distribution names, or distros.
We're at this nerd power site, and the reason why I brought us here is because there's this Linux distro timeline. One of the reasons why I like this timeline is because it's much more simple. There are a ton of distros out there, and this one just shows us some of the basic distros here.
So we see branched off from Linux we've got Debian, and from Debian Ubuntu branches off right here, and we've got Edubuntu. So those are some ones that I've worked with in the past. Same thing with — we've got Slackware, which SUSE branches off of there, so that's another one that I've worked with. We also have Red Hat down here, and it branches off and creates Fedora.
So we've got all of these different branches that were created, and what these branches mean is, when we look at Fedora right here that's branched off from Red Hat, that means a lot of the same code was reused from Red Hat to create Fedora. So there's a lot of similarities in how those two operate.
I brought us to this YouTube video, and it's showing us what's happening over time. It's going month by month. This is 2019, now it's 2020, and it's showing you what the different distros are and what the popularity is. So we can see that Ubuntu has been very popular in the past, and more recently it's starting to lose some popularity, where Arch Linux has gained popularity.
One consideration with this is that Ubuntu, Debian and Mint are all part of the same branch, and so it could be a little misleading from that perspective. But this gives us a good visual of how things have changed over time.
Not only are there different distros out there, but even within a distro — for instance, let's say Fedora. If we take a look at Fedora, there is actually maybe a server version, there's a Workstation version, and there's other versions as well. So here we are at the Fedora Project site, and as we scroll down we can see these different versions. Here's the Workstation, the Server, the IoT, the Cloud, the CoreOS. So we see these different versions. If we wanted to set up a server, we would use this version of Fedora. If we wanted to set up some sort of IoT devices, we could use this version of Fedora.
Here's the Workstation version of Fedora. I haven't touched this hardly at all, so this is a pretty fresh install. In the top right here we see our power button, if we wanted to shut down this machine, speakers, we've got the network connection. I can click on this to bring up some applications down here that we can see. We've got Firefox here, so if I wanted to use that, calendar, files, we've got hard disk if we want to install hard disk on there. I can click on here, I can see some more apps.
So let's go ahead and open up the calculator. I'm going to just type in calculator and open up the calculator so we can see what the calculator looks like, and there's the calculator. I can also click and see down here that these are the apps that are pinned to the taskbar down here, and then the calculator is not — it's just a program that's open, so it's divided by this little divider. But if I wanted to pin it, I can pin it to the dash and then it shifts it over with all the rest of them. Or I can go back and I can unpin this, and then it goes back to just being an open application.
So this is Fedora, and how Fedora is set up, and kind of the visual of what Fedora looks like and the programs that are in here.
This is an example of Ubuntu. We can see that the taskbar here on the left side is kind of permanently there, or semi-permanently there. But we see the same thing: here are the quick launch apps that we have on here, there's a little line right here, and then anything that's pinned there. And here we could also open up the calculator as well, so let's go ahead and open up the calculator, and there's what the calculator looks like. So very similar.
A lot of the programs that are created for these are essentially attached on top of the operating system and will be just part of the operating system, so they use a lot of the same programs, although the core of it is just a little different, and the look and the feel of it different.
And then once again, I could right click on this and pin to dash if I wanted to do that. I have this show apps button down here, so I can click on that to see all the apps that are on here, and I've got a lot of the similar options. Usually on some sort of Linux system you have a terminal, because we end up doing a lot within the terminal. And it's showing us also a couple of desktops, so we could actually select this one to make a clear desktop, or this is the desktop I have the calculator on.
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