Networking support in Linux-Unix is superior to most other operating systems. Linux is without doubt the most secure kernel out there, making Linux based operating systems secure and suitable for servers.
Note: Linux is Unix with added support for pc hardware.
Of the top twenty-five websites in the world by Alexa’s count, only two aren’t running Linux. Those two, live.com and bing.com, both belong to Microsoft. Everyone else, Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, etc., etc., are running Linux.
Looking deeper, Linux’s importance to the Web is even more extreme. By W3Cook’s analysis of Alexa’s data, 96.3 percent of the top 1 million web servers are running Linux. The remainder is split between Windows, 1.9 percent, and FreeBSD [Unix(=Linux)], 1.8 percent. [96.3 + 1.8 = 98.1%+ of the web is Linux-Unix]
Important versions of Unix are HP-UX, AIS, BSD, etc.
By contrast, 90% of desktop pc’s “clients” [vs. servers] run Windows.
Linux is Unix-based and Unix was originally designed to provide an environment that’s powerful, stable and reliable yet easy to use. Linux systems are widely known for their stability and reliability, many Linux servers on the Internet have been running for years without failure or even being restarted. Even the world’s most powerful supercomputer runs on a Linux-based operating system. Linux-Umix is secure, it highly restricts influence from external sources (users, programs or systems) that can possibly destabilize a server.
In Linux, you can modify a system or program configuration file and effect the changes without necessarily rebooting the server, which is not the case with Windows. It also offers efficient and reliable mechanisms of process management. In case a process is behaving abnormally, you can send it a kill signal-command thus doing away with any implications on the overall system performance.
Linux is regularly used – on scientific workstations to provide network services, as a business computing platform, as a software development platform, and for personal computing at home or in the office. There is even software to connect Linux to midrange systems such as IBM’s AS/400 and legacy mainframes running SNA.
Linux supports connections to networks using TCP/IP, or IPX via token ring, Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, ATM, X. 25, ISDN, or modem.
Linux is now finding its way onto phones [Android], televisions, thermostats, and even cars. [many car companies – including Toyota, Honda, and Ford – sponsor the Automotive Grade Linux project]
There are a few reasons for all this. The most obvious is that while Windows Server licenses cost money, most versions of Linux are free to download and use even for commercial purposes. Beyond that, Linux is open source, which means anyone can freely modify and redistribute its source code, tweaking it to better serve their own purposes.
As the web grew, developers tweaked Linux to meet their needs and released new Linux-based operating systems that bundles all their favorite web technologies together. Important technologies like the Apache web server, MySQL database, and, soon, the PHP programming language became staples of every major Linux distribution.
Even Microsoft, once the sworn enemy of Linux, has embraced this open source OS. In 2012, the company announced that it would let companies run Linux on its cloud computing service, Microsoft Azure. About one third of Azure instances are now running Linux instead of Windows. And Microsoft itself is using Linux for some of the networking tech behind the scenes of Azure. In fact, Linux is so crucial to web development that Microsoft partnered with Linux vendor Canonical to make it easier for programmers to build Linux applications on their Windows laptops.
By the end of 2014, Shareaholic reported that “Collectively, the top 8 social networks drove 31.24 percent of overall traffic to sites.”
Number one? Facebook with, naturally, Linux. Then, in this order, Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And, what to they run? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t count. It’s Linux of course.
only Linux combines stability, de facto standardization, high stability and security, and low cost. Ironically, for all the chatter about how “hard” Linux is, it was the perfect operating system to take the Internet from engineers to everyone.
Or, to put it another way: Every Facebook post you make, every YouTube video you watch, every Google search you run, is done on Linux.
PS
headline: “IBM investing $34 billion in Red Hat”
Note: “Unix is not a specific operating system. Rather, Unix refers to a family of operating systems, the most common of which include macOS, Android, and Linux.”
see
www.tecmint.com/why-linux-is-better-than-windows-for-servers
www.what-when-how.com/networking/linux-networking/