While I was sitting at my parents house over Easter talking with my Dad, it suddenly dawned on me that Linux had finally gained supremacy over Windows and Apple, something that I never thought I’d see. However, it wasn’t able to pull off the feat using a traditional PC: instead, it used mobile devices via Android OS.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a new idea. The thought has been broadcast across the interwebs over the past few years, though only recently did Android actually surpass iOS in adoption across the phone and tablet markets. Seeing the range of new products coming out on the horizon, this trend will only continue upwards as multiple companies release products using the Android OS as the backbone for their software.
What some forget, however, is that the core of Android is, in fact, the Linux kernel. My HTC Inspire 4G, running Android 2.2.1, is using Linux kernel 2.6.32. My Linux box at home runs Linux kernel 2.6.35, a slightly newer version. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of differences in kernels (nor do I care…), but let’s just say that there has been some disagreement between Google and the maintainers of the Linux kernel as to whether Android OS technically counts as “Linux,” though I believe most would say that it absolutely does.
I guess I just find it fascinating that this “Little Operating System That Could” finally found an audience and most people don’t even know it. Dad introduced me to computers when DOS and Windows 3.1 were king. However, once our family started having multiple computers, he toyed with other operating systems, including OS/2 Warp and Red Hat Linux 5.2. While he purchased a copy of OS/2, he frequently picked up copies of Linux from the Public Library, installing different flavors of Linux for free on his system(s). As I was curious about these different systems, I learned more about it and once I went to college, grabbed an old Gateway 2000 computer and put Red Hat 6.1 on it, followed by various other iterations of Linux. Over the past decade, it’s been my desktop operating system of choice, always getting better and better.
But few people know how good Linux has gotten. It’s an excellent operating system, as it has been for years. Sure, it still doesn’t run Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, or a multitude of Windows- or Mac-only video games, but it does do one thing remarkably well:
Web-browsing.
And if you want to make a device that is constantly connected to the internet, and don’t want to pay high development costs or licensing fees to Microsoft or Apple, which operating system makes the most sense for you to use?
Linux.
As we all move further toward cloud-based computing, and companies like Google keep focusing on Linux as their technology of choice (as it’s behind Android OS and Chrome OS, which will power netbooks and tablets beginning this year), further adoption of Linux will take place in populations that never thought they’d ever use it. Part of this is because the Linux kernel has always had a remarkable “efficiency” to it that Windows has never been able to re-create. You always needed newer hardware to run the most modern Windows systems, while you could run a modern Linux system on practically nothing. Mobile phones, especially, use relatively slow processors when compared to the quad-core monstrosities powering many desktops today. Heck, it was just revealed that an early version of Windows 8 will be the first one to run on an ARM processor, the technology powering practically every mobile phone sold today. Up until now, Windows hasn’t even been capable of running on anything like that, unless it’s the feature-poor Windows CE. Windows will ultimately make it to tablets, but not before Android and iOS have a massive foot-hold on the market, as they already do on phones.
It’s just fascinating to consider how far Linux has come and what ended up actually pushing it “over the top.” We all thought Dell offering Linux on laptops would do it, or the multitude of governments, schools and companies across the world that switched from Windows (or Unix) to Linux would do it.
It was the telephone all along.
I probably should’ve known that Android was linux-based, and last night while trying to figure out how to copy pictures from a micro-SD card, I used the app AndExplorer to see that at the core was root. Made me very curious, then I read this today. Funny.
Getting at my micro-SD card is a pain. I find it easier to either e-mail the picture(s) to myself, or upload them through Picasa. I’m lazy enough that I’d rather to that than remove the case surrounding the phone, and then remove the batter cover in order to get to the SD card.
But yeah. Linux kernel with some extra Google froo froo on the top. 🙂