Explainer

Linux is the kernel that manages core interactions between software and hardware. Many complete operating systems combine it with GNU tools and other software developed by a wider community. That distinction helps explain how one kernel became the foundation for many different systems.

The key ideas

  • The kernel is one part of an operating system.
  • Linux and GNU began as separate projects.
  • A distribution combines many software components.

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Original recording: TikTok, 2020-12-18.

Video transcript

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Automatically transcribed from the original recording. Small transcription errors may remain.

History of Linux. So Linux came onto the scene in the early 90s as the creation of software engineer Linus Torvalds and the Free Software Foundation, aka the FSF. So in 1994, Linus released version 1.0 of the Linux kernel, the core of the operating system that has complete control over everything in the system. And as a student at the University of Helsinki, Linus developed Linux out of frustration over licensing issues with Minix, aka Mini-Unix, which was a Unix-like operating system based on microkernel architecture. It, however, was not just Linus who made the Linux we know today.

During this time, Richard Stallman and the FSF made efforts to create an open-source Unix-like operating system called GNU. They started with making utilities for the operating system first, but these utilities were then added to the Linux kernel to create a complete system called GNU Linux, which we all know today as just Linux.