A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection, which is based upon the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one of the Linux distributions, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to powerful supercomputers.
This is a list of operating systems specifically focused on security. General-purpose operating systems may be secure in practice, without being specifically "security-focused".
LWN.net is a computing webzine with an emphasis on free software and software for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It consists of a weekly issue, separate stories which are published most days, and threaded discussion attached to every story. Most news published daily are short summaries of articles published elsewhere, and are free to all viewers. Original articles are usually published weekly on Thursdays and are available only to subscribers for one week, after which they become free as well. LWN.net is part of Eklektix, Inc.
The Linux kernel provides several interfaces to user-space applications that are used for different purposes and that have different properties by design. There are two types of application programming interface (API) in the Linux kernel that are not to be confused: the "kernel–user space" API and the "kernel internal" API.
PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, macOS, as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. Microsoft Windows was previously supported via the MinGW toolchain. The Windows port has not been updated since 2011, however.
Phoronix is a technology website that offers insights regarding the development of the Linux kernel, product reviews, interviews, and news regarding free and open-source software by monitoring the Linux kernel mailing list or interviews.
The systemd software suite provides fundamental building blocks for a Linux operating system. It includes the systemd "System and Service Manager", an init system used to bootstrap user space and manage user processes.
perf is a performance analyzing tool in Linux, available from Linux kernel version 2.6.31. Userspace controlling utility, named perf, is accessed from the command line and provides a number of subcommands; it is capable of statistical profiling of the entire system.
gummiboot is an open-source boot manager. Its final independent release is version 48. It has since been merged into systemd as its systemd-boot component and maintained as such.
Trojitá is a free software IMAP and SMTP email client developed using the Qt C++ library. The design goals of the maintainers are to develop a fast e-mail client which respects open standards, is cross-platform and uses the available resources very efficiently.
Elliptics is a distributed key-value data storage with open source code. By default it is a classic distributed hash table (DHT) with multiple replicas put in different groups. Elliptics was created to meet requirements of multi-datacenter and physically distributed storage locations when storing huge amount of medium and large files.
git-annex is a distributed file synchronization system written in Haskell. It aims to solve the problem of sharing and synchronizing collections of large files independent from a commercial service or even a central server.
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019.
Zstandard is a lossless data compression algorithm developed by Yann Collet at Facebook. Zstd is the reference implementation in C. Version 1 of this implementation was released as free software on 31 August 2016.
The NOVA file system is an open-source, log-structured file system for byte-addressable persistent memory for Linux.
Container Linux is an open-source lightweight operating system based on the Linux kernel and designed for providing infrastructure to clustered deployments, while focusing on automation, ease of application deployment, security, reliability and scalability. As an operating system, Container Linux provides only the minimal functionality required for deploying applications inside software containers, together with built-in mechanisms for service discovery and configuration sharing.
