this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
309 points (98.7% liked)

Linux

48332 readers
561 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I thought I'll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

I'll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It is, that's what Windows does. It's also possible to compile programs to not need external libraries and instead embed all they need. But both of these are bad ideas.

Imagine you install dolphin (the KDE file manager) It will need lots of KDE libraries, then you install Okular (KDE PDF reader) it will require lots of the same library. Extend that to the hundreds of programs that are installed on your computer and you'll easily doubled the space used with no particular benefit since the package manager already takes care of updating the programs and libraries together. Not just that, but if every program came with it's own libraries, if a bug/security flaw was found in one of the libraries each program would need to upgrade, and if one didn't you might be susceptible to bugs/attacks through that program.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Thanks you so much for explanation.