Differences in Windows, Mac, Unix and Linux operating systems?
Saturday, April 5, 2008 by Praveen
Windows - the odd one out being that it follows pretty much a path of its own that motsly the others aren't as related to... it started from DOS, and they built a GUI ontop of it... windows is an operating system but it has many differences, however, that doesn't mean it doesn't interface with the others in some ways.
Unix - the next easiest since its one that goes way back like DOS (if not before)... Today I guess UNIX is mostly the base for operating systems like Linux and Mac (more on that later), it is a multi-user system thats proven over time to be flexible and quite useful... it tends to use X-Windows as its main GUI. Historically it is a commercial product and its main Desktop was CDE (built on Motif widgets/etc.)
As for Linux, its based on UNIX and retains many of the kinds of features Unix has, it uses X-Windows (known as xorg, formerly xfree) and it has a choice of different desktop/window managers the two most common being Gnome (built on GTK widgets/etc.) and KDE (built on QT widgets, etc.). Not only that but it comes in "flavours" called Distributions, the major ones being Redhat (the-non-enterprise versions more recently known as Fedora, and Mandrake Linux, now known as Mandriva was at some point based on it)... Debian (which Ubuntu is based on) ... and Slackware, the major differences between these distributions are generally the type of package management (to oversimplify packages = programs) that they use.
Another one to take note of is Gentoo... a lower-level Linux that runs each package through the a compiler to "emerge" it into your system.
Sidenote: Aside from perhaps the Distributions aspect, much of the same can be said about BSD, however it is a little more like a type of UNIX...
Mac - another odd one out, since Macintosh has gone through the most significant changes through generations, from m68k processors, to Power PC's to now Intel processors... Mac used to be an operating system like no other, using an OS that was identified by a System version, with a file manager called Finder, which is still the case today, but OSX is a very different animal. OSX is built on top of a hybrid of BSD Unix called Darwin, its current GUI is called Aqua, before that there was Cocoa, and Carbon (which are also built into OSX I believe)
Unix - the next easiest since its one that goes way back like DOS (if not before)... Today I guess UNIX is mostly the base for operating systems like Linux and Mac (more on that later), it is a multi-user system thats proven over time to be flexible and quite useful... it tends to use X-Windows as its main GUI. Historically it is a commercial product and its main Desktop was CDE (built on Motif widgets/etc.)
As for Linux, its based on UNIX and retains many of the kinds of features Unix has, it uses X-Windows (known as xorg, formerly xfree) and it has a choice of different desktop/window managers the two most common being Gnome (built on GTK widgets/etc.) and KDE (built on QT widgets, etc.). Not only that but it comes in "flavours" called Distributions, the major ones being Redhat (the-non-enterprise versions more recently known as Fedora, and Mandrake Linux, now known as Mandriva was at some point based on it)... Debian (which Ubuntu is based on) ... and Slackware, the major differences between these distributions are generally the type of package management (to oversimplify packages = programs) that they use.
Another one to take note of is Gentoo... a lower-level Linux that runs each package through the a compiler to "emerge" it into your system.
Sidenote: Aside from perhaps the Distributions aspect, much of the same can be said about BSD, however it is a little more like a type of UNIX...
Mac - another odd one out, since Macintosh has gone through the most significant changes through generations, from m68k processors, to Power PC's to now Intel processors... Mac used to be an operating system like no other, using an OS that was identified by a System version, with a file manager called Finder, which is still the case today, but OSX is a very different animal. OSX is built on top of a hybrid of BSD Unix called Darwin, its current GUI is called Aqua, before that there was Cocoa, and Carbon (which are also built into OSX I believe)
