What defines an operating system isn’t a geeky label or a collection of ramblings from the mouths of its community members. Nor is it some empty and pointless certification offered up by an obscure ...

Two weeks ago frequent contributors p_msac and bportlock challenged me to see Linux as not Unix and to discuss the consequences of that difference. The reality here is simple: Linus Torvalds started ...

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a PDP-11. Peter Hamer [CC BY-SA 2.0] Last week the computing world celebrated an important anniversary: the UNIX operating system turned 50 years old. What was ...

The Unix operating system has been around for decades, and it and its lookalikes (mainly Linux) are a critical part of the computing world. Apple’s operating system, macOS, is Unix-based, as are ...

One is the world's oldest Linux distro, the other isn't Linux at all. Each delivers superb stability - let's compare.

On August 25, 1991, a Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds announced a new project. "I'm doing a (free) operating system," he wrote on an Internet messaging system, insisting this ...

Unix died because of endless incompatibilities between versions. Linux succeeded on servers and everywhere else because it provided a single open operating system that everyone could use. With the ...