Tfw what is UNIX

Aight Im a windows using millenial but since no one's tried giving a serious answer (because this doesnt deserve its own thread) I'll try to help. Ive passively picked up enough knowledge from reading memes that I think I can tell you:

UNIX is a family of operating systems, I think based on the POSIX specification. I guess early on in computer science history, people weren't sure how to best organize an operating system and what practices would work best, since no one had really done it before. So these dudes got together and laid out a specification of what would be the most coherent way to organize and implement these things. But it's a broad enough specification, that many people were able to come up with their own POSIX-compliant/UNIX family implementations (operating systems)

GNU's Not Unix, duh it's in the name! But seriously GNU is a movement/organization that focuses on making software "free". One massive contribution to this was the license they created, which can be used by developers to guarantee their software will remain free even if other people wish to tinker with it. They also directly created or helped create a lot of the functionality found in Linux systems, including a lot of the commands used in the linux terminal

There's probably some unintentional misinformation there, but this it helps

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GNU is kind of a religious movement I've been involving myself with. The words of saint iGNUcius shall prevail

>>what is GNU
A clone of the Unix operating system.
>>why is LINUX free
Because Torvalds felt like making it free.
>>if GNU it's a OS why it need LINUS Kernel foremost
GNU actually has its own kernel called HURD but few people use it.
>>why i can't play videos and audio on my LINUX Mint
Dunno m8
>Seriously, which book teaches this kind of thing in ELI5 mode? I'm more interested in the concepts/history.
Wikipedia

Please at least learn to greentext before you post
>unix
The godfather of modern operating systems, made by some nerds in the 70s who also made C. Copyrighted by AT&T. Relatively easy to use, difficult to master, and very powerful.
>Linux
The free and open-source version of Unix, mainly the kernel. Pretty much reverse-engineered from the ground-up to work like Unix, but with none of the pesky copyright. Torvalds wrote the kernel and just used the already-existed GNU tools to fill in the gaps, because why break your back over writing tools that are already free and open source and do what you want?
>GNU
A bunch of tools and libraries, such as bash, gcc, and grub, that work with the Linux kernel to make it a usable system.

>ELI5

Linux looks very interesting, even if some of the screen colours and menu options appear to be a little out of the ordinary. But you are missing a vital point, a point which takes some experience and depth of knowledge in the field of computers. You see, when a computer boots up, it needs to load various drivers and then load various services. This happens long before the operating system and other applications are available. Linux is a marvellous operating system in its own right, and even comes in several different flavours. However, as good as these flavours are, they first need Microsoft Windows to load the services prior to use. In Linux, the open office might be the default for editing your wordfiles, and you might prefer ubuntu brown over the grassy knoll of the windows desktop, but mark my words young man – without the windows drivers sitting below the visible surface, allowing the linus to talk to the hardware, it is without worth. And so, by choosing your linux as an alternative to windows on the desktop, you still need a windows licence to run this operating system through the windows drivers to talk to the hardware. Linux is only a code, it cannot perform the low level function. My point being, young man, that unless you intend to pirate and steal the Windows drivers and services, how is using the linux going to save money ? Well ? It seems that no linux fan can ever provide a straight answer to that question ! May as well just stay legal, run the Windows drivers, and run Office on the desktop instead of the linus.

>tfw what is UNIX
An old as fuck operating system that had a shitton of great ideas
>tfw what is LINUX
A clone of that old as fuck operating system, but with support for modern hardware and a pletora of programs that bring it into this century
>tfw what is GNU
It's a bizarre "virus license" that if you change a GNU program, you have to republish the source code, so corporations can't just take the code.
>tfw why there is so many LINUX
The core linux is very raw, basically just a "program runner", so depending on the combination of linux programs you install on it, it can do very different things, so all those "linuxes" are packs that come with preinstalled linux programs for different purposes.

Retard

This man is correct, listen to him.

the big part you missed is that:

Bell Labs ran the world. Invented the telephone, then the transistor itself, then computers, then a badass operating system to run on their computers for making the phone network work. This thing wasn't called UNIX but it's basically the original UNIX.

> US government was like "err, monopoly much? You can't also sell your software because reasons. Microsoft wouldn't stand a chance."

Bell Labs agreed were chill and decided that universities could use it for free. USC Berkley Computer Science Club for Nerds maintained the "central" version of this free software, called Berkley Software Dudes, or BSD.

Lots of universities used BSD as the framework for PhD projects - write a event logger, write a time server, write a firewall, etc. Most of it was shit, but the good stuff would be seen by the Berkley nerds and get churned in to the official distribution. But there were different ideas on what the official distribution should be. Different "distros" evolved.

Bell labs was bought up and scattered to the winds. They sold the rights to UNIX to a company called Definitely Not Monopoly who tried to sell BSD, but ended up getting sued by the jewish overlords at Berkley because by now THEY owned the copyright. or 95% of it.

Linus Tourniquet couldn't get laid so he thought sinking 10000000 hours into making something just like BSD but not quite and also all written by him. He failed to exclude everyone else but ended up making Linux. People still cant agree what the central version is except for the kernel because fuck that noise.

Some BSD fags decided "you can't sell our software" was too restrictive and let people do that (freebsd/openbsd/netbsd). Apple used it as the base for osx and now have more money in the cayman islands than all virgin nerds combined.

microsoft sucked up all the other companies that weren't from BSD/Linux and somehow people preferred that than arguing with strangers about the importance of systemd

>BSD/Linux
GNU/Linux*

GNU is basically garbage, except for GCC of the GNU C Compiler, which turns C code into x86/AMD64 machine code - which is to say write C, run it on any processor that supports a set of commands (all Intel and AMD). This is a mega hard thing to do because you need several layers of Aspergers to waste your life doing this. But Richard Stallman persevered. Thinks he's some kinda god now despite LVMM having to be invented that does the same thing but better and less autistically. Actually i'd say more autistically because it's better and more logical. Since you can't take someones source code and do all this Free/open BSD and Linux shit without compiling it, it served as an important component of the collaborative coding phenomena.

GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's not Unix".
Linux is the Finnish word for freedom.

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell

This is just an annoying person who won't go away. Ignore the things he says, and don't reply to him. He refuses to be enlightened.

>Linux: an open-source Unix-like kernel
Well, if open source means compiled binary blobs with partly unclear, unknown or plain proprietary licensing, yes.

He didn't write Free Software though. 'Open Source' today means what you just described. Look at the open source products made by Microsoft and Google.

>UNIX is a family of operating systems, I think based on the POSIX specification.
Second sentence and already wrong.

>GNU is a movement/organization that focuses on making software "free".
That's the FSF. GNU is an operating system development by the GNU Project.

>unix
when you want to post in screefetch threads, but have a mac
>linux
when you want to post in screenfetch threads, but have an android

UNIX: an operating system developed in Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in the late 60's.
Unix: a trademark handled by the Open Group for offering OS's that conform to POSIX standards and the Single Unix Specification (SUS) the distinction of being an approved "Unix" system.
unix/*nix: a shared idea on the internet as to what constitutes whether or not a system looks and behaves like a Unix/UNIX system. GNU, Linux, and BSD would technically fall into this category, while occupying no others, whereas macOS or Solaris would be Unix and unix, but SysV UNIX and BSD 4.4-Lite2 would be all 3.
Linux: a kernel that imitates the archetype for the UNIX kernel. typically distributed with GNU userland.
GNU: a userland (basically the user programs, e.g. shell, compiler, etc.) that imitates the archetype for the UNIX interface. typically distributed with the Linix kernel.

Why are there so many distributions of Linux?

because there are a variety of computing interest that individual projects aim to accomplish, and are later made out in newer distributions or merged with older ones. for example, linux-libre is a project to isolate the kernel utility of Linux from licensed and proprietary code, often in the form of drivers. other distribution may focus on pairing the Linux kernel with an Open/FreeBSD userland, perhaps with intent to have a "Linux" without "GPL'd" code, or to integrate GNU/Linux into an array of technical specialities.

well, that was the best i can explain all of this

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GNU is an operating system like Unix but entirely free and Linux is one of its kernels.