Linux Evolution and Popular Operating Systems

0:05Hello, and welcome to Linux Essentials. My name's James Conrad. It's my pleasure to be here with you as you delve into Linux. Now, I've gotta tell you, this course is mostly for those of you that are new to Linux or you've really never worked with it, or you've just kind of dabbled with it, but it doesn't necessarily mean you have to be new to IT. I mean, I've worked with Windows for, gosh, since the early 90s, whenever the first version of Windows came out. So a long time. I've also worked with Linux off and on for probably the past 20 years, although, to be honest, it's been with Cali Linux, which is the the hackers version of Linux.

0:43Don't tell anybody. So, yes, some of us might have more experience than others, but I'm gonna teach this course so that even if you have little or even no experience with Linux, you're gonna be able to progress through it to a point where you're gonna feel some competency with it by the time you're done. Alright, stick around. We're gonna have a great fun with this course. Let's take a look at the next video where I talk about the operating system itself.

0:01Alright, let's take a look at Linux. But before we get too far in it, I want us to understand really what an operating system is. It might seem a little obvious what an operating system is, but sometimes that line gets a little bit fuzzy as we start to work with various applications as well. So let's just establish this right from the beginning what an operating system is right here. Okay, first of all, really it's a platform for software. Your operating system itself, it's not really very useful unless you can run some kind of software on it, okay? If you think about what your day-to-day is, most of us, for example, will use a web browser today.

0:34A web browser is software, okay? It's a application or a program that runs on top of the operating system and it interacts with the operating system. We cannot run that application without the operating system, okay? It also interacts with the hardware. It uses some other things called drivers, but the basic idea there is the operating system is what communicates with the hardware so that when I type something on my keyboard, when I draw something on my screen, which I can do right here, that is me interacting with the operating system, which then communicates to the hardware and sends some kind of an instruction to it.

1:12There's also, I/O from the user, and by the way, that's what this is when I'm writing on the screen, which I'm doing right now with this stylus, that's I/O from the user. So again, the operating system is what is able to send and receive input and output. Now, let's take a look also at the kernel. What is that? That's pronounced like kernel as in, Colonel Sanders or something like this, but really it's a core part of the operating system. It's kind of the heart of the operating system if you will, the programming that's at the very center of it, that actually provides the operating system itself.

1:50There are other things that can kind of bolt onto the operating system, if you will, or augment it, or improve it, or change it to some point, But the kernel itself is really the most central part of this. So, for example, when you step up to your computer, in other words, your hardware, this is your computer and you hit the power button here and it turns on, what happens? Well, it has to load an operating system, and that's what happens next. It loads an operating system, and it could be anything. It could be Windows, it could be Linux, it could be a MacOS, so whatever the operating system is, that's what loads.

2:28Once that operating system loads, then it can communicate with the application. And the applications, which you decide to open, or which some of 'em open automatically as well, those are what the user then interacts with, okay? So the user will interact with that operating system, interact with that application, maybe they're typing something on the keyboard, it pops in words in the application, and then the application will display that to the user, okay? So the user generally interacts with both the applications that are on the computer as well as the operating system itself.

3:03Now, I also want you to be aware of a word called binaries, just in case, because sometimes people will refer to binaries. What is that? These are the actual files. These are the code files that comprise the kernel and or the operating system. You'll also hear binaries referred to in software. So when you're working with, say, Microsoft Word or some word processing application, well there are binaries that make up Microsoft Word. Similarly, there are binaries that comprise Linux.

3:36We're gonna be taking a look at some of the specifics of Linux in the next nugget so I'll see you there.

0:00So where did Linux actually come from? It's actually invented by a specific person, but it kind of has its roots in another operating system. Let's take a look at it. So in the history of Linux here, it's really started by a guy named Linus Torvalds. Okay? Linus Torvalds. He was a student, I think he was in his twenties. I don't remember that specific detail, but he was at a university in Helsinki, Finland at the time. And in 1991, he decided he wanted to create Linux, which, by the way, is a combination of something called Unix and his name, that's where the spelling comes from.

0:36So Linus would be L-I-N-U, and then he took the X off of Unix and made it Linux, okay. Just quickly, what's Unix, since we're getting our roots of Linux, out of this? 1970s-ish, AT&T had an operating system called Unix, and it was designed to run smaller computers, and- (short laugh) Computers back in those days, you have to understand if you're not familiar with them, the technology I have in my iPhone is more than we had, probably, to shoot a rocket into space and land a person on the moon, okay.

1:14So back in those days, there were entire rooms with less power than what my phone has right now. And so Unix would run on a lot of these large, large computers and was just very cumbersome in a lot of ways, right? Well, Mr. Torvalds here, he wanted to create Linux so that it would run on smaller computers. Now with Linux, there's no actual shared code base with Unix, okay, with that operating system.

1:46It didn't borrow from Unix or anything like that, particularly. It's only the principles that are similar there between Linux and Unix. Now, the other thing about Linux, is it's designed to be run on what's called an X-86 processor. Now, without getting into all the history of the various processors, back in those days, back in the 90's, we had processors that were considered what we call X-86. These would be basically the Intel processor, okay?

2:16Intel came up with that architecture. Other companies later on also had the same architecture or similar architecture, but that's where it started. And it follows us even today. So if you have a computer right now, that's not a Mac, it probably follows some version of this early Intel architecture, there. The roots of that will still be in your computer now. Anyway, Linus Torvalds wanted Linux to be able to run that kind of computer because that would be something that anybody could run, right?

2:47They were more affordable, you didn't have to have a million dollars to buy a server room and pack it full of all of these gigantic computers that Unix used to run on. Now, another thing that's unique about Linux is that it's not owned by a specific company. Microsoft Windows, obviously, Microsoft owns Windows. The Mac-OS, obviously, Apple owns the Mac-OS. But with Linux, nobody really owns it. It was a shared code base, it was open source, meaning that Linus Torvalds and all of the people that have succeeded him in the years to follow, they made Linux available, publicly available, so that anybody could look into it.

3:28Usually the kernel of an application, which we looked at in our last nugget, the kernel and the source code and all of that, is a very closely guarded secret with, you know, for-profits or for proprietary applications and operating systems. Well, with Linux, they just opened it up to the world. This gave it tremendous power because people with technical capabilities and programming capabilities, they could kind of as a group, improve and build upon what Linux originally was.

4:00So that's kind of where it's very unique there. Now, because it's open source, because it's not specifically owned by anybody directly, there's really no service or support offerings, okay. However, some of the various flavors, or we also call them distributions or distros, some of the various distros of Linux do offer service and support. So there is a for-profit model in it. When we say that Linux is free, that doesn't mean that it prohibits any kind of profit. Somebody could definitely profit from it and, and many have, but you don't have to pay for it if you don't want it, okay.

4:34If you don't want to pay for it, you can get Linux for free. So that's a little bit about where Linux came from. Yes, there's a whole lot more to the story, but we're not gonna get into that as a full history lesson here. I just want you to be aware of, kind of its origins. And then in our next nugget, let's take a look at how Linux compares to another operating system you may have heard of, Microsoft Windows.

0:00If you've used personal computers at all, you've probably used some flavor of Microsoft Windows in the past. In the recent years, we've had, oh, let's say Windows 8, which was not very well received. A lot of people didn't like it very much, but then Windows 8.1 was a little bit better. Windows 10 was pretty good. And now we're on Windows 11, which is actually a pretty good operating system. So since many of you have worked with Windows in the past, I thought it'd be a good idea here if we could kind of compare Windows to Linux so you can kind of get a grasp of how they're the same and how they're different.

0:36Now, first of all, obviously Windows 11 uses a graphical user interface. Likewise, Linux uses a graphical user interface. By the way, why do I have a picture of some penguins up there? To represent Linux. Well, there's a lot of different stories behind it, but one of the stories is that a Linus Torvalds, of course, again, the person who founded Linux had a penguin kind of nibbled on his finger one time, and he thought it was really cute or something like that.

1:06Now, there's other stories as well. I'm not sure which one's true, but regardless, turns out now that the penguin and this is not the official picture of it, of a Linux penguin, so to speak. I'm not sure there is an official one, but there are many pictures of penguins out there that look similar to this that represent Linux. Anyway, Linux also does have a graphical user interface. In fact, let's just go ahead and take a look at that just briefly. And here I've got an installation of Linux.

1:36This is the flavor of Linux that we're looking at here is Ubuntu, and it's one of the various flavors. There's different ones, which we're gonna be looking at in future nuggets, like there's a Debian Linux, which I also have somewhere over here. And there's this one, and there's Kali Linux, which is actually based upon one of the other versions of Linux. So, like I said, there's a lot of different distributions or flavors of Linux. When it comes to Windows, there's only Windows, okay? But regardless, here we see that there definitely is a graphical user interface.

2:08See, I've got wallpaper here. I've got icons I can click on over here. I can go to the Firefox web browser, for example, allows us to browse to the internet. So we've got a browser here and we've got Thunderbird mail here, which you can use to check our email. We've got several different other things throughout this. We're not gonna exhaust that right now, but you get the idea. It's gotta graphical user interface. I'm using my mouse to move a mouse pointer around, and I could use my keyboard here to type in stuff if I wanted to type an email or something like that.

2:39Likewise, there's something similar to a start menu. So in Windows 10, there's a start menu that's down the lower left where my mouse pointer is right now. You can see it right down there. In Windows 11, it's a little bit closer to the center, like maybe about where my mouse pointer is now. But regardless, we have this kind of central point where you click on it and then you can see other applications that become available to you. So I can access a calendar here. I could access a Solitaire game. Oh, hold on just a second.

3:09So that goes there. Am I stopped already? Oh, geez. Anyway... Oh no, look, I can do that. I don't know why it won't let me put the king over there. Anyway, oh, I guess this is Klondike. Anyhow, the point I'm making here is, yes, we have a graphical user interface, and yes, there are other things that we can do with it that are very similar to Windows. So if you are used to Windows, or even the macOS, by the way, would be similar in a lot of different ways then you can access your applications. You can just click on icons that we see here.

3:40You can play games and all that kind of stuff. And there you go. Very, very easy to work with. Now, that's not necessarily how Linux started, because originally it was text only. Yeah, so you would just have a terminal window where you would type in bash commands of some kind. I'll get to that a little bit later on. And in fact, when it comes to people that become more intermediate to advanced in Linux operating systems, well, they're gonna be probably pretty well acquainted with that command line.

4:12Now, also, Windows 11 is right now the most widely used operating system or a flavor of Windows. Windows eight or 8.1, or Windows 10, or Windows 11. And then there are also Windows servers out there. Regardless, on desktops, Windows is the most widely used operating system on the planet. So if I even go to this particular website right here, and you can go there too, if you want to, just out of curiosity or something, then we can see that I've got Windows as a desktop operating system which is very prevalent.

4:44Right now it's looking at all platforms, which includes Android, which actually there's more Android than Windows, but on the desktop, like for a computer as opposed to a mobile device then you can see here this blue line is Windows. It's way up here. Way far away from these other operating systems. The next closest one would be at 14% of the market share. And that would be OS X. Linux at this time, I think July is how far this goes. Yeah, July, right now it's a poultry 3% market share in terms of installed desktops.

5:20Now, does that mean that we're headed in the wrong direction? We really shouldn't pay attention to Linux, because after all, Windows is way up there. No, Linux actually appears in many other operating systems. So for example, I'm getting ahead of myself, but if I go back here and go to all platforms again, remember what the top one was right here, this orange line right here, that's Android. Android has a lot of roots in Linux. So when it comes to learning Linux, you are not wasting your time. There's a lot there, and there are a lot of very reliable and powerful servers that run Linux.

5:56In fact, Microsoft has a cloud-based service called Azure, and they even make Linux servers available to install in Azure. So even Microsoft has acknowledged and they also use some Linux servers, by the way, for their own purposes. So certainly, Linux is used less frequently on fewer desktops than Windows 10, 11, something like that, less frequently used. But it is growing fast and it's actually appears in many places that you might not expect it.

6:27Now, on Windows 11, the focus of this operating system is going to be Microsoft's servers. They have servers that are usually named after years, like server 2016, Windows server 2019, Windows server 2022, and presumably there will be a Windows server 2024, '25, or something like that in the future. Now we also have desktop users. Those numbers I was showing you a moment ago, those relate to desktop computers where people just perform daily work or play games or entertainment.

7:05They have one on their desk at home, that sort of thing. When it comes to Linux, there's a bigger focus probably on servers. We're gonna be looking at this in the future, but Linux is very, very efficient in the resources that it uses on a server. So it can also be very inexpensive. And that's the other thing, remember Linux on its own, there's no charge for it, whereas Microsoft can get expensive. We also have Linux in special purpose. That might be devices in your home, such as various types of thermostats or various types of interactive appliances.

7:42Things like this could actually be using Linux as the base operating system. And we also do have desktops for it. That's what I was showing you earlier when I started a solitaire game that I could barely even get started. Anyway, now, when it comes to issuing commands to Windows, how do we do that? When we tell Windows we want it to do something, or even if we're just using an application on Windows and we want that application to do something, how do we interact with it? How do we do it? We use the graphical user interface.

8:14That's what I was showing you earlier with Linux, for example, where how to start menu. You click on stuff, same thing with Windows. You could just click around whatever you can see there, right? There is also a command line there where you have to type in a command, for example. So for example, I've got a Windows command prompt open here. If I wanted to know what my IP address was, I could do IPconfig like this, and it would show me what my IP address is. So we could see down here, one of them would be 172.25.240.1.

8:46Now you don't have to memorize that or anything. I'm just showing you that we can use a command what I just issued right here, to get a result in a command prompt window. Oh, well, we can also use something called PowerShell. PowerShell was developed several years ago by some folks at Microsoft, and it is very powerful, as the name seems to imply you can do a lot with it. It allows you to do lots of kinds of automated and repetitive tasks so that instead of doing a task one at a time, PowerShell can automate it for you and you can use it to create scripts and everything like this.

9:21Getting a little ahead of myself. Anyway, when it comes to Linux, we do the same kind of thing initially. We can use a GUI, you saw me use that earlier. Graphical user interface. They also have something called bash, which stands for the born again shell. I'm not gonna go into the history of that, but that's what that means. Anyway, it's another thing that you would type in in the UI, and you can do that from within what we call a terminal as well. Lemme give you an example of that over on Linux. So here, for example, on my Ubuntu system, if I wanted to use a command to type in and to learn my IP address on this computer, I would go to terminal.

9:59So I'm clicking on that start menu, and I'm going to terminal right here. And this is where we would enter in something to find a result or to issue a command. Here I want to find out my IP address. So I'll do an IFconfig. It's different in Linux than it is in Windows. In Windows it's IPconfig, here it's IFconfig, very similar. And I get the same kind of information. So for example, here it's telling me that my IP address is that right there. 192.1 68.177.130.

10:31Again, you don't need to memorize that, I'm just telling you that we can use a typed in command to get a result and to operate that computer. Another thing is Windows 11 has a very large code base. There are millions of lines of code in Windows. I can't remember what it is now, but one of the earlier versions, I think it was Windows seven. So for years ago, years and years ago, that was over 40 million lines of code.

11:02That's huge. When Linux first came out, and of course this was the old version that was very small, it was originally very tiny. There were only 88 files that comprised Linux, and the entire size of it was 231 kilobytes. Operating systems nowadays are the sized many, many gigabytes in size. And to be fair, the newer versions of Linux are also getting much larger because of this. They're using a graphical user interface that takes a lot of programming, a lot of stuff that makes the whole application bigger.

0:00All right, so we've looked a little bit about the history of Linux and some of it's characteristics and things, but do we still want to use it? I mean, sure, it's interesting, but is it useful? The answer to that is definitely a, yes. So if we take a look at Linux here, let's identify some of the reasons why we'd wanna use it. One of the things we already mentioned in the origins of Linux is that it is open-source. So, does this mean that I am going to program into Linux or change its code or modify it somehow? No, I'm not a programmer, and I don't wanna be, honestly, my brain just does not think that way.

0:35And yours may not be either. However, the advantage is, that because it's open-source, other people, these are supposed to be people here, (chuckles) we can magnify the expansion capabilities and features of Linux, because there's so many other smart people out there that know how to modify it, and customize it, and provide additional value to Linux. We're not just dependent upon some giant multi-billion corporation in Redmond, Washington somewhere, okay?

1:07So that's one of the reasons. The other reason is similar to that, and that is that it's customizable, yeah. So we have people that are capable of customizing it, adding additional features, making it work, and even, you don't have to program, okay? There are a lot of things within Linux, you don't have to be a developer to be able to do those sorts of things. So it has a lot of flexibility built into the operating system. And, in my mind, I'm kind of comparing some things to Microsoft and to Windows. Sure, Windows is also customizable, but with Linux, because of the first point we made here, there's an additional level of customization that could happen, that normally a company might not want, but that we can do.

1:50So, it's also stable and secure. Now, this is somewhat variable, the stable part, all right? There are installations of Linux, which stay up and running, not only for months at a time, but for years at a time. And one of the key things in servers especially, and I'm thinking about servers right now, particularly, is that you want something called five 9s, okay? Okay, it looks like a 5 foot 9, which actually I am. But anyway, you want five 9s here, and that means 99.999% uptime.

2:24That's about five minutes of unplanned downtime per year. This is kind of the gold standard for servers. And so if we can get our servers to be stable so that they're up with five minutes or less of unplanned downtime per year, that's pretty good. And, in fact, a lot of data centers and a lot of high-end server functions and products only promise four 9s. So, you take a look at that, and you look at the fact that a lot of Linux servers can be up for years without any downtime, that's pretty darn good.

2:55Now, the reason why I said that's a little bit fuzzy sometimes is because it's open-source and it's customizable, okay? So, somebody may have been into the source code of it some places, and if they fiddle with it, they could also make it less stable. But there's a lot of vetting that goes into that, a lot of checks and balances, and a lot of other, developers normally, which will area check your code, and help to be more stable. But I'm just saying it's more possible. There is a window of opportunity for it to be less stable in some instances.

3:26It is also very secure. It follows very good security standards that are very well-established and mature, and it can follow along with all of those things. In terms of things like high-level encryption, so you can encrypt files, you can encrypt entire disks, you can use certificates to do a lot of different functions, such as, again, additional encryption, or to perform digital signatures, log on security, all kinds of things, are very, very secure there. If you use it, okay? No operating system is secure if you turn off certain security features, okay?

3:59So, provided that you're using it. Now, the other part of that is, let me clean up a little bit, cost effectiveness. Yes, again, you can get Linux for free, certainly for the desktop I've downloaded a few, just looking at the past couple of weeks here. I'm just using it for free, I don't have to pay anybody. On a Windows machine, if you wanted to download the Evaluation Version, you know, here's the desktop right here, and down in the lower corner over here, it'll say, You have 30 days until your trial version is over," and then it gives you this countdown. You have five days left, and so on, and so forth.

4:31There's ways of kind of cheating that and extending it a little bit, but you can only go so far, and eventually, you're gonna run out, and then you're gonna have to pay however much it costs to license that edition of Windows. Now, with a desktop, I think you can get Windows for less than a hundred bucks now. So, not overwhelming. I would just have to give up Starbucks for a week, okay? In order to be able to afford that. Now, with Linux, I don't have to give up my coffee, I've got it right here, in fact, okay? So, it's very cost-effective that way. Now, there are expenses as we mentioned before in previous nuggets, where if you use something that's a major vendor, such as Red Hat, we'll be getting to this in a little while, you can still get a low cost, or almost, or just about free, but if you want some kind of support or backing from Red Hat Linux, then you're gonna have to pay a little bit.

5:20And finally, it's just plain fun to work with Linux. There're really boundless opportunities for finding new things to do and new features, and there's all kinds of online resources for finding out additional items. And that's another reason to use Linux, by the way, I didn't really put it in a bullet point, but a big community of enthused Linux fanatics out there that are usually very willing to help if you're running into any problems or willing to help you figure out how to do something. And again, it is just plain fun.

5:51If you get tired of one distribution, you've kind of worked your way through it, which is gonna take a lot of time. If you work your way through it, and you want something else, move on to a different distribution or distro. What are these distributions? Stick around for the very next nugget, where I'll be discussing that.

0:00Alright, so we talked about the various distributions of Linux in the past. We kind of touched on it, but what is it really? By the way, we call it distribution, or we'll call it a distro just for short. And sometimes we'll also call it a flavor, a flavor of Linux. I don't know where that came from. But anyway, that's what we call it. These are all considered synonymous. Penguin is sitting right on my head, let me get out of here. That penguin sure knows how to create some uncomfortable moments. Okay, anyway, so what is a distribution? It's a bundled package. Now that package can include a lot of different things.

0:31One of those would be the kernel. Remember we talked about the kernel kind of as being the core, if you will, of the operating system itself, okay? Beyond that kind of as a wheel of spokes, if you will, you'll have other things. I mean, there's drivers, there's services, things like this that can help to interact with the hardware or that can perform a continuously running action of some kind that's often what a service might do. And then beyond that, in another circle out here, you would add onto that an additional ring here where you might have your applications, okay?

1:05So anyway, all of this out of the box, if you will, when it's brand new, for example, and you first download an ISO or a distribution and you install it, it might include all of these things by default. So by way of example here, I've just popped over to another installation of Linux. This is Debian Linux. Now, what's unique about this is that it looks like it's already installed, right? But here it says install Debian. Well, wait a minute, is it installed or do I still lead to install it? Well, it's not installed. This is actually running directly off of the ISO, so I can run it off of a media.

1:40So you could run that, for example, if you wanted to, you could put it on a thumb drive. This is true of most installations of Linux, probably all of 'em really. You could run it off of a thumb drive and then just kind of plug it into a machine boot off of that thumb drive and diagnose something, you know, fix something, do something, whatever. It's also very useful for hacking, by the way. Anyway, so here we have this, okay, this is just running the core. I've not made any modification to this. It's just running the core of Linux, which is the Debian version. That's what this a little symbol here in the middle is.

2:12That's kind of their symbol. The logo included in this particular distro were of various applications and things, which you see over here on its start menu, okay? I didn't install any of that. Those are just already there, okay? So again, that is part of the distribution. Now, each distribution or flavor will have a specific goal in mind or a purpose or an audience in mind, that sort of thing, right? So one of those would be one we looked at in previous nuggets, and that would be Ubuntu.

2:44It's generally considered a good desktop distribution of Linux. It's got a nice graphical user interface or GUI. It's very user-friendly. You can click your way around it and kind of figure out where you need to go and what you need to do. It's very popular and there's a lot of different ones that are geared toward the desktop. Initially, when Linux first came out, as I mentioned several nuggets ago, it was command line only, which is not very user-friendly, and it's kind of geeky, okay? So a lot of times people did not gravitate towards Linux, and I think early in the early days it was only us geeks that kinda liked it.

3:20Now with the desktop, it's starting to gain more traction and it's had a desktop for a few years now. The server, this is something that, again, for most administrators, you're probably gonna mostly run it from the command line. In fact, a lot of distributions of Linux, you're not even gonna use a GUI really at all. You're just gonna do everything command line. But the other thing with a server is it's generally got a very efficient resource usage. So you can run an installation of Linux as a server without using hardly any resources, and that way it will save your CPU, it'll save your memory.

3:55It's usually pretty light on disc space that it has to use, and yet it can perform a lot of powerful functions just using that. Each distribution will also use what we call a package format. Now, you may have heard of different kinds of ways of packaging up files, okay? One of the most common ways you might have heard of would be something like a ZIP file. This is really just compression, but you might have, you know, a bunch of different files here, which you can compress into a ZIP file. And then in Windows, at least, if you double click on the ZIP file, it exposes the contents of that ZIP file and you can drag them out somewhere or you know, expand them somewhere, something like that.

4:31A distribution is somewhat similar in that respect, and we'll get into this a little bit more later, but the file extensions will usually be Deb for Debian or Red Hat Package Manager or RPM. Now, there's gosh, dozens, maybe of different Linux distributions. Most of them will use one or the other as their primary package format. So they don't all have their own unique package format, just for sake of standardization. They usually gravitate towards one of these, and there are more distributions than we can really practically cover here.

5:03Like I said, there's gotta be dozens of different ones and some homegrown ones and stuff like that. But some of the more common ones, we'll start here with Debian, okay? Debian, it's a very popular one. The basis of it is a distribution of Linux called GNU, and this is probably the, one of the biggest ones out here, okay? It started by somebody named Ian Murdock in 1993. The goal here with Debian is reliability. It'll run forever. It's very stable and reliable.

5:34And this also incorporates someone else, someone named Richard Stallman's principle that the OS is free to use, study and distribute and improve, okay? That does not mean that you can't charge for it if you're a company and you want to charge for the support or some kind of a service package or something like that, okay? Now where do we get the name Debian? Well, this is a hybrid of the name Debra and Ian. I think Debra was Ian's wife or girlfriend at the time, or no, it was girlfriend at the time, later his wife, then later his ex-wife okay, so a little family history in that.

6:11Anyway, that's Debian. Now let's move on here to the next one. And that's one I use quite a lot as well. That would be Ubuntu. I kind of recommend Ubuntu if you're new to Linux, you're getting started and you'll want to kind of ease into it in a very user-friendly way. This was started by someone called Mark Shuttleworth, and he had a team that also was with him here, and they started this in about 2004. The goal was exactly this, an easy to use desktop version. That's why I recommend that you start with Ubuntu if you are new to Linux.

6:43This again is gonna have free software, some free software that's included with it. It also has a very low service expense. I do know of some companies that have installed Ubuntu as the user desktop because it's very cheap. I mean, you don't have to really pay for anything, like you'd have to pay for Microsoft products, for example. So I keep giving Microsoft a hard time. It's a good product, but you do have to pay for it. And if you want really expensive, then you would have to go to Mac. If you had gave everybody a Mac workstation or a MacBook Pro or something like that, or a MacBook Air or something like that, their hardware is extremely expensive, although they're very good.

7:21Well, again, with Ubuntu, we're running this on off the shelf PC hardware or PCs that you could put together if you wanted to. But PC hardware is generally less expensive. The operating system here, I mean, you can't compete with free folks. In terms of its updates and everything like that, it does have a biannual release for major servicing, and then there's a long-term support release every two years, which generally that will encompass everything that has been released in the biannual releases prior to that. And then we have Red Hat, oh, this is fun.

7:53Wonder if I can put, no, I can't quite get up there. Anyway, then we have Red Hat here. This is another one that's kind of a gold standard really with Linux. Its name recognition has been around for quite a while. It is an organization that was acquired by IBM in 2019. Now, why would IBM be interested in acquiring Red Hat? IBM is in the business of making money, okay? So it kind of rubbed some people the wrong way, but there's a long history in that as well. However, they do offer a good product for this.

8:23They offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Enterprise Linux here is exactly what it sounds like. It's for installation on servers that you intend to run for a very, very high uptime. Remember we talked about five nines in a previous skill, previous nugget, well, that's what you get with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, extremely powerful, extremely reliable, and it's got backing by IBM there. So it's an enterprise solution, and again, there's gonna be some fee-based subscriptions and licenses that you can pay for along with that.

8:57It's been a while since I was here, but I thought I'd just take you to the Red Hat website here at redhat.com so you can kind of see what they have. You can buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Let's just take a look at what some of the prices are. A server by itself, $349. That's likely cheaper than a lot of the Microsoft licenses, but look at this one. Virtual Data Centers, $2,499. Now, I'm not gonna get into all the pricing, I'm not gonna get into all of what you get with that. I just wanna point out that yes, Linux is free, but if you want high level of services along with them, or high level of features especially, in the enterprise, that does need to be paid for.

9:37And most companies are happy to pay for that. Alright, let's take a look here also at Fedora. Now, the purpose here is also for desktops, much the way Ubuntu was. The thing here is that it's gonna be also maintained under kind of the Red Hat umbrella. It's sometimes used for pre-release or late breaking features or updates. I don't wanna quite say it's, you know, beta, but it can, you can kind of think of it that way a little bit. The only reason why that's significant is because for some installations of any operating system, could be Windows, whatever, a lot of corporations don't want the newest update or the newest feature because they want time to test it out first.

10:17They don't want it to suddenly get installed on all the computers and then find out that there's some kind of an incompatibility with an application that they have or something that they're doing, and then it crash the entire organization. So if you're kind of on the bleeding edge a little bit, you might be a little bit more interested in Fedora for the latest stuff, okay? And again, as I mentioned, I think in our last nugget all Red Hat is generally gonna use Red Hat package manager package format. Oh no, I mentioned that earlier in this video, didn't I, okay. I don't what to say.

10:48Hey, I just learned I'm gonna be a grandpa, so I'm a little distracted today, folks. I'm probably gonna have to start acting my age now. Alright, okay. There's also CentOS. Now the advantage here is that you get a taste of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, 'cause it uses the free parts of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Code. Again, it's free to use, but there's no support. So a lot of organizations might like this because if they're a new organization, they're on a budget, whatever, or they want to kind of test this out and see if they really like how it's how it operates, they can use this completely for free.

11:21If they decided they wanted to, maybe they would then migrate to the paid version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There is also SUSE. Now the temptation is to call this Susie Linux, alright. The people at SUSE have made great efforts and even at conferences and things to emphasize that the name is SUSE. They even created a musical YouTube video on it. You can Google it if you want to. It was a little hard to watch for me folks. But anyway, SUSE Linux is another great product.

11:53This uses the YaST configuration tool to install and configure software, hardware, set up servers and networks, okay? We're not gonna get into that any further right now. It just uses a specific configuration tool called YaST, alright. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Again, you have different tiers of this. You have SUSE for maybe a desktop goal or desktop configuration, but on the higher end you might have something that's a little bit more similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, okay? And again, as I mentioned, there's a desktop version as well.

0:00All right, now as we conclude this particular skill, let's take a look at some kind of outliers of the Linux operating system. And when I say that, I don't mean they're uncommon, I just mean that you don't interoperate with them in the way you would on a desktop operating system or on a server. So those other Linux flavors, if you will, will be one of those would be Android. Okay, so Google got into this game about 2003 and then again in 2005, and they have of course kind of pioneered the whole Android operating system, which is a flavor of Linux, if you will.

0:31So, you've seen Android many times on tablets, phones. Android phones are the most prevalent phones, smartphones in the world ahead of iPhone. You'll also see it on other devices such as touchscreens, televisions. I think I mentioned before, I have a television over there. I think it's got a version of Linux on it. And I say that because when I saw it do an update once it briefly flashed a console that looked like it was a Linux terminal. Anyway, you'll see it on watches, gaming consoles, all kinds of stuff. But then you also have this Android Open Source Project.

1:02I don't know if they like us to pronounce this AOSS or not pronounce it at all. But regardless, these are open source apps, of course. Google implements this a lot for many of their various services, such as their calendaring, Google Play. They use it in Chrome, they use it in a lot of different things there, okay? Embedded Linux can be used in things like home automation, factory floor computers of some kind that can control some kind of an automation there, machinery, all kinds of different things. And the embedded ones, there's not generally gonna be someone like in a console that works on it from day to day.

1:38Generally, these have single-purpose functions that can carry out very consistent and regular operations. There's Raspberry PI, which is quite fascinating. This started from an educational charity in the United Kingdom. And what it is, is it's this right here. If you take a look at it, it's got a lot of different things on here that you would have on a normal desktop computer. It's got an HDMI port there, ethernet connection, it's got USB here, there's an audio in and an audio out. So, a lot of the same stuff there that you'd see on one of those types of devices.

2:12Now the thing is, lemme show you, they're about the size of a credit card. This is just a gift card my sister got me so I can go to the movies. Anyway. So, but they're about this size, though. Can you imagine a whole computer this size? Well, you can't really use it for everything, but they are very effective and useful for their form factor, right? They also normally use an ARM processor, which as opposed to an X86 type of a processor or an Intel processor. Reason why a lot of organizations like to use ARM is because they are a more efficient instruction set.

2:45So they like the way that they program to it. And because it's more efficient, it requires less cycles for a lot of things, and therefore will consume less power. Less power also means less heat. So there's a lot of different advantages to ARM, and that's some of them you that I just described. But the version of Linux or the flavor of Linux will be compiled so that it can work with ARM processors. Now, notice some things that are missing here. We don't see a video card, but there is video. That's why we have an HDM there, but it's just basic video.

3:16You're not gonna play, I don't know, World of Warcraft or what's another one, Call of Duty or something like that on one of these kinds of machines. The other thing you'll see here is some risers, okay? So, there's an expansion there. So with that, you can add in what we call extension boards, for example. Do notice that there's no storage on here particularly, okay? So the way, you can't even boot it on its own. Normally for these, you're gonna put in an SD card into a reader, and then you'll boot off of that.

3:47We also have cloud, right? So Linux, actually, you would be surprised to know this, Linux is actually on 90% of the cloud workload worldwide. So I think normally we kind of tend to think that, oh, it's Amazon Web Services or AWS, or we think that it's Microsoft's Azure. Well, the cloud consists of 90% Linux devices. Even Microsoft's own cloud, Azure, uses Linux devices and you can even set up a Linux server in Azure.

4:18So anyway, I'm kind of getting in the weeds there, but point is Linux is pretty well permeated into the cloud. When we use Linux in the cloud, it's usually for infrastructure as a service or IAAS as we call this. Without getting into too many details with that, that's various types of services that you can make available in the cloud. So it could be for a security purpose of some kind. It could be something simple like a DNS servers, something like that. What are the advantages for using a Linux device in the cloud is that they're very fast to spin up and make available.

4:53And so, those are some of the other versions or flavors of Linux or some of the other ways that it's used out there in the world.

0:01All right, let's go ahead and take a look at what the correct answers are for this particular scenario. So I'm not gonna reread the whole question, but just bear in mind that we have user desktops here and we have a budget of exactly zero. It reminds me of how much money my wife gives me. Anyway, so what operating system would be best for the desktops under a zero budget? Okay, that would probably be Ubuntu Linux, okay? Now, why is that? Because remember, they also had an objective here that it must be user-friendly as possible, right?

0:34User-friendly, free, that's just definitely Ubuntu, right? We looked at that. Now, the IT staff, look here, we have a requirement that we install a distribution that's known for pre-release features, okay? So these might be, you know, new features or new functions within Linux that are not really as publicized yet, haven't been tested as much yet, we looked at that previously as well. And if you recall, that would've been Fedora. Okay, that's Fedora. Now, manufacturing, let's take a look at that one.

1:05And by the way, my answers may not appear in the same order yours do, these get randomized, okay? So first one I did was desktops, the second one I did was IT staff, the third one will be manufacturing. Again, your order might be different. So what do we have? Okay, the new department will be operating an automatic hat maker and needs a credit-card-sized device, that should say sized device. (instructor laughing) I'll fix that before you get this. So what would that be? Remember, we talked about it's really not just operating system in this case, it's also hardware, right?

1:37So we don't really specify the operating system here, but we do know that something that's credit-card-sized would be Raspberry PI, okay? And then, of course, you can put whatever version of Linux that you needed on there. Remember that that's also an ARM processor, all right? Now, the server, if we take away the server, remember, it must have a subscription or service plan, and the supervisor's willing to pay for those services. Remember, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL as we sometimes refer to it as well, is not free, but you do have to pay for a subscription or a service plan for that.

2:15And I think you probably know the last one for sure. Any operating system for the smartphone that is not Apple, okay? There's only really a couple of choices anymore, there used to be a Windows phone, and that was about as successful as a lead balloon that died a quick and glorious death. Anyway, so the other choice you'll have here, of course, will be then Android.