Linux is a free, open-source operating system: the core software that manages a computer’s hardware and lets other programs run on it. It started in 1991 as a personal project by Linus Torvalds and grew into the software that runs most of the internet. The vast majority of web servers and cloud platforms run some version of Linux.
Think of an operating system as the manager of a building who controls the lifts, the power and who gets into which room. Linux is a manager you can fully inspect and adjust, because the blueprints are open to everyone. That openness is why it shows up everywhere: in the hosting behind websites, inside almost every Android phone, in routers, smart TVs and even cars.
Linux comes in flavours called distributions. Ubuntu and Debian are popular for servers and desktops, while Red Hat and its relatives are common in large companies. They share the same core, the Linux kernel, but bundle different tools, their own package manager and different defaults. For a server you often pick a long-support release, so you get years of security updates without a big upgrade.
There is a practical reason Linux dominates modern infrastructure. Almost every container image, the lightweight packages that ship today’s apps, is built on a Linux base, and the big cloud providers price their Linux machines lower than Windows ones because no per-server licence is owed. So when you spin up a server on AWS or a small box at home, Linux is usually the default and the cheapest path.
At TopDevs we run client services on Linux because it is reliable, free of licence costs, and gives us the control to tune a server exactly for the job it has to do.
