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 ...

Back on September 12, fellow blogger Marc Wagner wrote a long rebuttal to my comment that the Linux community should stop trying to make Linux look like Windows and just let Linux be Linux. As part of ...

Look at almost any mission-critical computer system in the world—servers, workstations, embedded computers, and many more—and ...

MacOS and Windows are the two most popular desktop and laptop operating systems. They’re the two central OS choices dominating the desktop and laptop markets today. But have you heard of the ...

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 ...

Takeaway: Unix’s rock-solid reliability means that its relevant now more than ever – and Linux puts Unix’s power within reach. Unix has been around for a very long time. We remember the rampant ...

Unix died because of endless incompatibilities between versions. Linux succeeded on servers and everywhere else because it ...

Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson, a programmer ...

It probably shouldn’t, but it routinely astonishes me how much we live on the Web. Even I find myself going entire boots without using anything but the Web browser. With such an emphasis on Web-based ...

Need a jump start on Unix networking? Whether you're working on your home network or setting up systems at work, here are some basic Unix commands and insights that might prove helpful. Once upon a ...

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 ...