Linux basics

1. What is Linux ?

Linux is an operating systems that runs our devices. It is the most popular OS in the world and it is being used in our phones, cars, refrigerators and more. Besides it is also very reliable, secured and provides fast processing.

Linux OS consists of several components in which Kernel is core part where CPU & memory is managed and it is usually referred as Linux. One can directly interact and run commands in linux kernel either using GUI or CLI.

2. Why linux is so popular? And is widely used in devops?

   Linux is widely popular because of following reasons

   1. Open source & Free of cost

   2. Huge community support

   3. Highly secure

   4. Linux distributions

Devops perspective:

Other than the reasons mentioned above, there are few other strong reasons to consider linux in devops, which are

1. Customization & Scalability

As devops teams often requires tailored solutions for different applications, linux is very much flexible in terms of choice of tools, scripts. It is also worry free and very robust OS. It is easy to scale up from small to large infrastructure to handle workloads.

2. Automation & Scripting

Automation is core part of devops and Linux is undisputable choice interms of automating tasks. We can write set of commands to do a particular task in terms of bash, Python or Ruby script.

3. Monitoring and security

Linux also provides monitoring tools and other optimization techniques for the application performance.

4. Containerization

As the containerization platforms highly rely on linux as underlying OS, opting linux is ideal to create light weight containers and use them across different environments.

3. What are ubuntu , centos .. etc?

   Ubuntu and centos are linux distributions. There are several other distributions avaiable which are free to use. Each of these have different use case based on the requirements.

4. What is WSL? Is it equivalent to Linux on windows?

   WSL stands for 'Windows subsystem for Linux'. As name depicts it acts as light weight virtual machine with linux OS running on Windows host machine. With advent of virtualization and containers linux became a necessity. WSL allows us to uses both windows and linux both in same machine.

5. What are the commands used in linux?

   There are many commands available, few of them are

   'ls' - to list all directories

   'touch' - creates a file

   'cat' - to open the file

   'chmod' - to assign permissions to a file or folder

   ' grep' - to search for given string

6. How is shell scripting different from linux commands ?

   On Linux, imagine you have a sequence of commands you perform regularly to complete a specific job. Instead of typing them out each time, you can bundle them together into a single file called a script. These scripts can be written in either shell scripting languages (like Bash) or programming languages like Python.

7. What are limitations or disadvantages ?

   Some of the disadvantages are steep learning curve, hardware compatability issues.

8. GUI vs CLI ? Which one is preferrable?

   While GUI and CLI have their own strengths and weaknesses, it is up to the user and the requirement decides which one is better

   GUI is easy to learn as it is user friendly but it is slower comparatively. While it is difficult to remember commands in CLI, it is faster as it is less resource- intensive. CLI is ideal to run automation scripts and it is powerful.