Linux

Linux is a hugely popular OS outside of the desktop market. Android (the mobile operating system acquired by Google) is based on it, and it runs on most of the world's smartphones. Sometimes it is the main desktop option, if using a computer with specialized hardware, such as the Raspberry Pi. Linux is very popular on embedded devices, in part because it is lightweight and usually much less demanding on resources than a typical Windows or macOS installation.

Linux is also the most popular operating system for web servers, which is what interests us most here. It could be argued that Linux is the most popular operating system on the planet, although many users won't interact with it directly.

Some examples of popular distributions are Ubuntu and CentOS (Community Enterprise OS, a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Linux distributions can be classified broadly by the type of package management they use. This is useful when trying to find the correct version of software to install, although you can usually get popular applications directly via the distribution's package manager.

Many distributions are based on Debian and these include Mint, Ubuntu, and Raspbian (the official OS for the Raspberry Pi). These use a Debian-based package format and the APT package manager. The latest version of Debian is called Stretch and .NET Core supports it. It also uses it for the official .NET Docker images.

Other distributions use a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) RPM package system and the yum package manager. These include CentOS and YellowDog, just to name a couple. There is also SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), which is another different distribution, but .NET Core supports it too.

There are many other distributions, far too many to mention here. Linux is not one OS like Windows or Mac. We haven't even covered BSD-based systems, which use a different kernel. These include FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. Even macOS is built on BSD, with its NeXTSTEP heritage (the OS that ran the first web server at CERN).

Most of the instructions here will also work on the command line of Windows and Mac. The tooling is the same; even the graphical tooling in VS uses the same templates as the command-line dotnet utility.