UNIX is an operating system. An operating system, put simply, is a software that manages how the computer hardware is managed and interacts with other software. This includes scheduling tasks, resource management, and security features. A common example of this is Microsoft's Windows 8 OS for computers or the iOS system for mobile phones by Apple. While UNIX is almost non-existent in the consumer realm for personal computers, it has many features and applications that have made it widely-used in business computing, especially with servers and mainframes. Later operating systems that were based on UNIX include, among others, Linux.
Linux is open source, so it is free and works on a wide variety of systems, and users around the world can share and modify code for their own purposes, creating a huge community of developers. Compared to the dominant Windows platforms, some claim Linux also has superior performance speed and less proliferation of viruses and other threats. Different flavors of Linux include Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat, to name a few... but Ubuntu is the most popular.
Many times you'll be working in the Linux terminal. Refer to the picture below -
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| Anyone born after 1990 will see this for the first time and think: "shit, now what?" |
Linux OS does have a GUI you can work out of, but the terminal remains popular. It works like the Windows command line, but with a much more exhaustive command vocabulary. This is also called "the shell". For my fellow struggling young developers, if this is a lot of information to take in all at once, don't worry. I was so confused by this at first that I thought Unix was the command line language for Linux, and that "bash" was something you did to the keyboard when too many errors come up.
I will explore more of this in a future post, including some popular terminal commands. If you have any comments let me know!
PS - shoutout to a good friend who helped explain some of this all to me earlier this week
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