#linux kernel version history

[businessviewpointmag]

Version Control Systems (Git): An Essential Tool for Developers in India

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, effective collaboration and code management have become paramount for developers and teams worldwide. Among the myriad tools available, Version Control Systems (Git) stands out as a powerful solution that enhances productivity and fosters seamless collaboration. This article delves into the significance of Version Control Systems (Git), its core functionalities, and why it is a must-have tool for developers in India.

Understanding Version Control Systems (Git)

Version Control Systems (Git) are software tools designed to track changes in source code during software development. By maintaining a historical record of modifications, developers can manage their codebase efficiently, allowing multiple users to work on the same project without conflicts. Git was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005, primarily to support the development of the Linux kernel. Over the years, it has gained immense popularity, becoming the de facto standard for version control in software projects.

The Importance of Version Control Systems (Git)

Collaboration Made Easy: In the diverse and expansive tech ecosystem of India, teams often consist of developers from different geographical locations. Version Control Systems (Git) facilitate real-time collaboration, enabling multiple developers to work on the same project simultaneously. This eliminates the hassle of managing multiple code versions manually, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

Change Tracking: One of the standout features of Version Control Systems (Git) is its ability to track changes meticulously. Developers can view a complete history of modifications, and understand what changes were made, who made them, and when. This capability not only aids in debugging but also enhances accountability within the team.

Branching and Merging: Git’s branching model allows developers to create separate lines of development for new features, bug fixes, or experiments without affecting the main codebase. Once a feature is complete, it can be merged back into the main branch, ensuring a clean and organized project structure. This is particularly beneficial for Indian startups that may have limited resources and require efficient code management strategies.

Reverting Changes: Mistakes happen, and when they do, Version Control Systems (Git) come to the rescue. Developers can easily revert to a previous state of the code, saving valuable time and effort. This feature instills confidence among developers, knowing they can experiment and innovate without the fear of permanently losing their work.

Collaboration with Remote Repositories: Platforms like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket have revolutionized how developers interact with Version Control Systems (Git). These platforms offer remote repositories where teams can store their projects, collaborate seamlessly, and leverage additional features like issue tracking and continuous integration. For the growing number of tech startups in India, these platforms provide an excellent way to showcase projects and attract contributors.

https://businessviewpointmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/2.1-Collaboration-with-Remote-Repositories-Source-www.linkedin.com_.jpg

How to Get Started with Version Control Systems (Git)?

For developers looking to integrate Version Control Systems (Git) into their workflow, here are some steps to get started:

1. Install Git:

The first step is to download and install Git on your machine. The installation process varies based on the operating system, but it typically involves downloading an installer and following the prompts.

2. Create a Repository:

A repository is where your project files will be stored. You can create a new repository using the command line or through platforms like GitHub. Simply navigate to your project directory and use the command:

bash

Copy code

git init

3. Add Files and Make Commits:

Once your repository is set up, you can start adding files to it. Use the following command to stage files:

bash

Copy code

git add <file-name>

After staging the files, commit your changes with a message:

bash

Copy code

git commit -m “Initial commit”

4. Branching and Merging:

To create a new branch, use:

bash

Copy code

git checkout -b <branch-name>

After completing your work on the branch, merge it back to the main branch using:

bash

Copy code

git checkout main

git merge <branch-name>

5. Push to Remote Repository:

If you’re collaborating with others, you’ll want to push your local changes to a remote repository. Use:

bash

Copy code

git push origin <branch-name>

Best Practices for Using Version Control Systems (Git)

Commit Often: Frequent commits help maintain a detailed history of changes, making it easier to track progress and identify issues.

Write Clear Commit Messages: A well-written commit message explains the changes made, aiding team members in understanding the project’s evolution.

Use Branches for New Features: Always create a new branch for feature development. This keeps the main codebase stable while you experiment and innovate.

Regularly Pull Changes: If you’re working in a team, regularly pulling changes ensures that you’re up-to-date with your teammates’ work.

Learn Git Commands: Familiarizing yourself with Git commands can significantly enhance your efficiency. While graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for Git exist, understanding the command line can provide deeper insights into its functionality.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Version Control Systems (Git) are indispensable tools for developers, particularly in the vibrant tech landscape of India. By fostering collaboration, enhancing accountability, and streamlining workflows, Git enables teams to deliver high-quality software efficiently. As the demand for skilled developers continues to rise, understanding and utilizing Version Control Systems (Git) will undoubtedly remain a key skill in the arsenal of Indian developers. Whether you are a seasoned programmer or just starting, mastering Git will elevate your development process and contribute to your success in the competitive tech industry.

[myresellerhome]

What is Ubuntu: A Detailed Beginner’s Guide

Linux has been rapidly gaining popularity, not only among software developers but also among regular customers. This trend is expected to continue.

If you want to check out an open-source operating system or set up a virtual private server, Linux is an excellent option to consider. It gives you the ability to select the distribution that is most suitable for your requirements by providing a number of different options.

The term "distros" can also be simplified to "distros," which refers to operating systems that are based on the Linux kernel. Ubuntu is one of the most popular operating systems among them. It is possible to install it on physical servers, Linux virtual private servers, and personal computers.

Users are able to edit the code of the Ubuntu operating system, generate numerous copies of it, and freely distribute customisations without having to pay a licence fee. This is made possible by the fact that the Ubuntu operating system is an open-source programme. One of the additional advantages is the capability to produce numerous copies of the operating system.

Linux: What is it?

The Linux operating system is commonly regarded as one of the most popular and widely used operating systems in the history of the world. The best Linux operating system is used to power nearly everything, including mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, home appliances, servers on the internet, and even supercomputers. It is also used to power desktop PCs.

It was in the 1990s that Linux was first developed, and it has been in existence ever since. The UNIX operating system, which had previously dominated the industry before to the introduction of Linux, was replaced by this open-source and free alternative. The fact that UNIX was not open-source or free, on the other hand, contributed to its decline in popularity after Linux became accessible to the general public.

Various distributions of Linux operating system-

Numerous flavors of Linux operating system are available. Distributions, or distros for short, are the names given to the various distributions of Linux which are available.

There is a package management system included with each of the distributions, in addition to the Linux Kernel.

A database of the packages that have been installed on the system is kept up to date by package managers.

A record of the version number, hashes, and dependencies associated with the program that has been installed is maintained by them in order to prevent mismatches and the absence of dependencies.

There are currently hundreds of distinct distributions of Linux, each of which caters to a different user base.

Ubuntu has become one of the most widely used distributions.

What exactly is Ubuntu?

Ubuntu is a Linux-based open-source operating system that is extensively used. Canonical is responsible for its development and maintenance. In addition to being in charge of directing the ongoing development of the operating system, Canonical is accountable for delivering support and security upgrades for each and every version of Ubuntu. The fact that Ubuntu is available in a number of different versions, including core, server, and desktop, makes it possible for the operating system to run on a wide range of different electronic devices. The application is applicable to a wide variety of computing platforms, such as personal computers, servers, supercomputers, cloud computing, and many others.

Why should you use Ubuntu?

Ubuntu's popularity can be attributed to a number of factors, including the fact that it is appealing to builders who are looking for a free and open-source solution that is both secure and simple to operate. Because of the widespread use of the software and the collaborative nature of open source, the Canonical community provides a significant amount of support for Ubuntu. In addition to being user-friendly and customisable, the open-source operating system provides an increased level of protection within its own operating system.

Advantages of Ubuntu for beginners:

Full customisation of the product

There will be no limitations placed on your ability to perform customizations on Ubuntu. In order to get aesthetically pleasant appearances on your computers, it is simple to make changes to the themes that are already installed on them. Additionally, you have the flexibility to personalize Ubuntu within the environment of your web hosting server.

The Simplicity of Learning

To begin your path toward understanding how Ubuntu operates, you do not need to possess a professional degree or credential in order to get started. If you are interested in doing just that, you may begin your trip right away. You should examine community forums, articles from the knowledge base, and other learning resources that will provide you with information regarding the operation of the system. As a recommendation, you should do so.

Accessible to Users

Will you be using macOS or Windows as your operating system? If this is the case, then you're not at all unfamiliar with Ubuntu! Its user-friendly interface setup will allow you to recognize the taskbar, menus, and windows that are included in the configuration. Spending a substantial amount of time attempting to figure out how to use a brand new system is not required.

Resources of the System

When it comes to revitalising older technology, the Ubuntu operating system is typically the best choice. In the event that our system is experiencing a sense of sluggishness and we do not intend to update to any new machine, then installing Linux might be the remedy. Although the Microsoft Windows 10 operating system is loaded with features, it is quite likely that we do not make use of or require all of the capabilities that are built into the software. The capability is present; nevertheless, it diverts resources away from the duties that we are primarily responsible for.

It is not only a lightweight variant of Linux that has the potential to breathe new life into our old computer, but Ubuntu operating system is also one of the most well-known and reliable operating systems. At any point during the installation process, we have the option of selecting either a minimum or standard setup, which will further reduce the amount of resources and space that are required.

High degree of customisation

Our operating system can be customised with the freedom that Ubuntu allows. In the event that we do not enjoy a particular desktop environment, we have the ability to replace it with a different programme. In the event that we become dissatisfied with the desktop environment, we are free to try out various different environments. Ubuntu operating system is the best option for ongoing use because it automatically acquires these features, making it the finest choice. It is also possible for us to experiment with a wide variety of tools, such as Compiz, in order to make our experience with Ubuntu operating system more engaging.

Safety as well as Confidentiality

It's possible that we've heard individuals remark that the Linux operating system is more secure than others, but they are referring to the fact that it is open-source and does not contain any viruses that are specifically designed to target Linux. When we state that a piece of software or an operating system is open source, we mean that the source code is accessible to anyone who wants to make modifications or contribute code. For the purpose of addressing security flaws and vulnerabilities, a number of developers and individuals collaborate. Moreover, Ubuntu operating system is able to gather information about our hardware (GPU, CPU, and RAM), as well as data regarding our usage and location. However, we have the ability to opt out of the installation procedure either during the installation process itself or after the installation has been completed.

Performance of the Computer

Depending on the type of usage, the performance of the system will vary. It is advised, for instance, whether the system is used for creating, coding, testing difficulties, business purposes, or even just for employing a computer system for the purpose of using it. One of the reasons for this is that Ubuntu boots up more rapidly than Windows does, that it offers a number of integrated development environments (IDEs) at no cost, and that it is less influenced. If one is looking at Ubuntu from a gaming perspective, Mac and Windows are well ahead of Ubuntu in terms of performance.

Conclusion-

While utilising the Ubuntu operating system, we are able to burn an image to a CD and then boot it up from our media. This capacity is available to us. We are now able to test out all of Ubuntu's features without having to commit to installing it on our own hard drives. This is made possible by the fact that the operating system has been made available in a fully operational condition. This is due to the fact that the user has been given with the operating system in a fully working form.

Janet Watson

MyResellerHome MyResellerhome.com We offer experienced web hosting services that are customized to your specific requirements. Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram

[wikiuntamed]

Five steps of Wikipedia for Friday, 2nd February 2024

Welcome, mirë se vjen, bienvenue, vítejte 🤗 Five steps of Wikipedia from "BookScouter.com" to "Andrews & Arnold". 🪜👣

Start page 👣🏁: BookScouter.com "BookScouter.com is a comparison shopping website that helps buy, sell, and rent textbooks and used books online. The website compares offers and prices from 30 booksellers and buyback vendors in the US and suggests the most fitting place to purchase or sell a given book. The website is mainly used..."

Step 1️⃣ 👣: Chegg "Chegg, Inc., is an American education technology company based in Santa Clara, California. It provides homework help, digital and physical textbook rentals, textbooks, online tutoring, and other student services.The company was launched in 2006, and began trading publicly on the New York Stock..."

Image by Chegg

Step 2️⃣ 👣: Android (operating system) "Android is a mobile operating system (32-bit and 64-bit) based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open-source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Android is developed by a consortium of developers known as the Open Handset..."

Step 3️⃣ 👣: AOL "AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc. The service traces its history to an online service known as PlayNET. PlayNET..."

Image licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0? by Gino DePinto

Step 4️⃣ 👣: AOL Broadband "AOL Broadband was a UK internet service provider and part of the TalkTalk Group...."

Step 5️⃣ 👣: Andrews & Arnold "Andrews & Arnold Ltd (also known as AAISP, or A&A) is an Internet service provider based in Bracknell, England. The company was founded in 1997 and launched in 1998, serving businesses and "technical" home users.The company primarily operates as a reseller of connectivity products in the UK and..."

[hydralisk98]

Prospero (OS-dev? software development suggestions? Nth braindump for sure)

Inspirations & references...

AROS

ZealOS

Paradise + Lain

Microdot Linux

Zen Linux kernel with Liquorix?

KDE Plasma desktop environment minified to Liquid & KWin

Fish-shell

Es

Rio

8½

Cardfile

Symbian

DIBOL

Lotus 1-2-3

VisiCalc

WordStar

COS-310

Acme

Nim

Zig

C 2023+?

GNU Common Lisp

LibertyEiffel

TROPIX

ChrysaLisp

MINIX

Tlick

GNU Hurd

PhantomOS

Haiku

xv6

RISC-V

IBM PC-DOS

ITS

CDE?

AIX

z/OS (Hypervisor?)

Inferno

Plan9

OpenGenera

Elbrus

OpenPOWER

SPARC

OpenVMS

illumos OpenIndiana

Xerox GlobalView

OpenHarmony

OpenBSD

Project actual specifications, targets ...

Sasha (Es, Fish, Parade, ZealOS, ChrysaLisp, Wish "command shells")

LainFS (transparent-data multimedia libre filesystem / format)

Devi (scripting symbolic data editor & hypervisor)

Tal (interactive programming language deriving from GitHub's MAL repository & taking hints from Swift, F#, REXX & SBCL)

VUE (Visual Union Environment) compositing window manager? (imitating CDE, Haiku's, KDE Plasma, GlobalView...)

Xerxes (Hypervisor & multi-agent sandbox ecosystem)

Zorua (animated SVG & symbolic vector computation library)

Ava (synthetic-tier android individual built from such technical stack)

Maskoch (cute little black bear cub mascot)

Personalized shell environment (aesthetically and practically too)

{ Es (Plan9's newer shell), Fish (friendly interactive shell), Kate, K3B, Okteta, KDE Partition Manager, Devine Lu Linvega's Parade/Paradise, ZealOS', ChrysaLisp, Wish; } = Sasha (symbolic analytical shell A)

"Tal" as the Lisp dialect to script so much of whatever happens in "Sasha" the command shell, "LainFS" as multimedia filesystem + format, "Zorua" as animated SVG + OGV + OpenEXR USD-tier inclusive-embedding full-version-control-source archive of save-state instances (great for animating filesystem changes across multiple timelines & interpolating transition data between them?), "Xerxes" = hypervisor;

As far as what I intend to use such for, "Sasha" is a real-time "sandbox filesystem" virtual environment's REPL with which I desire to record multi-agent social simulation stories, using a custom Lisp dialect REPL (aka a lambda-calculus-like multimedia DSL), with cool X3D environements + 2D animated SVG illustrations / icons, interpolated as necessary, taking advantage of version-control mechanisms as well as direct-mode editing to make really customizable long-term "manifestation toybox" scenarios. It seems similar to existing NetLogo and symbolic GAI research stuff, but I want to personalize specific simulation steps / instances in a overtly transparent and open manner...

Like, let's imagine I generate lively / immersive TS2-like stories with MegaOCEAN NPCs, as to eventually import into QGIS+OSM or whatever game engine I so choose later... (I really mean it such to help goal manifestation in the data visualizations manner, but observing and documenting life scripts for scientific analysis would be fine.)

I really do think of this as a GLOSS data-respecting alternative to the ChatGPT / AutoGPT / LLM-based game dev stuff that Big Tech pushes onto us. Self-hosted, lightweight on the REPL, easy-to-compute / explain & useful for spiritually-minded individuals seeking historical validation or mindful whatever. (Sure does my blend of Geo-Syndicalism shine with my statements here...)

So you know, I will find a way to get to a decent response to this kind of proposition (not for game dev, rather for statistical / demographic history simulation & arbitrary long-term social timelines...); Hence my 16^12 stuff needing some computational assistance without compromising the ethos / integrity I would rather preserve.

Stay tuned!

[maartatech]

The Evolution of Android: From Humble Beginnings to a Global Force

Introduction

The Android operating system, known simply as Android, is a powerhouse in the world of mobile operating systems. Developed by Google, it fuels billions of devices, from smartphones and tablets to smartwatches and more. Whether you're an everyday user or a developer, comprehending the intricacies of the Android OS is essential. This knowledge empowers users to maximize their devices, tackle troubleshooting, and make informed decisions about the apps they embrace. For developers, it serves as the bedrock for crafting innovative and user-centric Android applications. In this comprehensive exploration, we journey through the realms of Android, unraveling its history, architecture, version evolution, key features, and its expansive ecosystem. By the time you reach the end of this article, you'll have an in-depth understanding of what propels Android, from its modest inception to its pivotal role in shaping the modern mobile landscape.

I. History of Android

Beginnings of Android OS: Android's journey had a humble start in 2003 as a project aiming to build an advanced operating system for digital cameras. Founded by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White, the project soon pivoted to mobile devices, paving the way for the Android OS.

Milestones in the development of Android: From Google's acquisition of Android in 2005 to the sophisticated operating system we know today, we'll traverse the significant milestones that shaped Android's evolution.

Key versions and their codenames: Android versions are often linked to sweet-themed codenames like Cupcake, KitKat, Oreo, and Pie. We'll delve into these prominent versions, dissecting their features and contributions.

II. Architecture of Android

Explanation of the Android architecture: Android's architecture is a well-structured framework comprising various layers working harmoniously to deliver a seamless user experience. We'll deconstruct these layers and illustrate how they collaborate to provide the Android experience we know.

Overview of key components: From the Linux Kernel responsible for hardware interaction to libraries, runtime environments, application frameworks, and the user-facing applications, we'll elucidate the roles these components play in the Android ecosystem.

III. Key Features of Android

Discussion of fundamental features: Android boasts a user-friendly and customizable user interface, adept at multitasking, coupled with a robust notification system. We'll also delve into its security measures, app permissions, and integration with the Google Play Store.

IV. Android Ecosystem

Overview of the Android ecosystem: The Android ecosystem is more than just the OS. It encompasses Google services, a thriving community of app developers, hardware manufacturers, and third-party app stores. We'll unravel these integral components.

V. Android Security

Explanation of Android's security measures: Android places a significant emphasis on user security. We'll delve into app permissions, Google Play Protect, and the importance of regular security updates.

Tips for enhancing Android security: We'll provide practical tips, including enabling device lock, downloading apps from trusted sources, keeping software updated, and using secure networks or antivirus software.

VI. Android for Different Devices

Discussion of Android's versatility: Android's adaptability extends to various devices beyond smartphones, from smartwatches and TVs to automotive systems. We'll explore the diverse range of applications Android powers.

VII. Android vs. Other Operating Systems

A comparison with competing operating systems: We'll compare Android with its primary competitor, iOS, touching upon open source vs. closed ecosystems, device variety, app ecosystems, and integration with their respective ecosystems.

Strengths and weaknesses of Android: Android's strengths lie in its customization options, device variety, and integration with Google services, but it grapples with fragmentation due to diverse hardware and software versions.

VIII. Future Trends and Developments

Predictions and expectations for the future of Android: The Android ecosystem teems with exciting prospects, from foldable devices and 5G integration to AI and IoT integration. We'll delve into these emerging trends and technologies.

Conclusion

Android's journey, from inception to versatility across devices, has revolutionized how we communicate, work, and entertain. Its open nature and adaptability have positioned it as a cornerstone of modern digital life. Staying informed about Android updates and advancements is essential to harness the full potential of your Android experience. Explore new features, apps, and technologies as they unfold.

XII. Additional Resources

For further exploration, check out these valuable resources:

Official Android Website

Android Developer Documentation

Android Authority - News, Reviews, and Tips

XDA Developers - Community and Forums

These resources offer a wealth of information, from official documentation to vibrant user communities, enriching your Android journey.

[progress-log]

Getting-Started-A-Short-History-of-Git - Chapter 1.2 A Short History of Git The Linux kernel is an open source software project of fairly large scope. During the early years of maintenance (1991–2002), changes to the software were passed around as patches and archived files. In 2002, the Linux kernel project began using a proprietary DVCS called BitKeeper.

In 2005, the relationship between the community that developed the Linux kernel and the company that developed BitKeeper broke down, and the tool’s free-of-charge status was revoked. This prompted the Linux development community (and in particular Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux) to develop their own tool based on some of the lessons they learned while using BitKeeper. Some of the goals of the new system were as follows: speed, simple design, strong support for non-linear development, fully distributed, able to handle large projects efficiently. Since 2005, Git has evolved to be easy to use, and is amazingly fast, very efficient with large projects, and has an incredible branching system for non-linear development.

Getting-Started-What-is-Git - Chapter 1.3 Snapshots, Not Differences The major difference between Git and any other VCS is the way Git thinks about its data. Conceptually, most other systems store information as a list of file-based changes. They think of the information they store as a set of files and the changes made to each file over time (this is commonly described as delta-based version control). Git doesn’t think of or store its data this way. Instead, Git thinks of its data more like a series of snapshots of a miniature filesystem. Every time you commit, or save the state of your project, Git basically takes a picture of what all your files look like at that moment and stores a reference to that snapshot. If files have not changed, Git doesn’t store the file again, just a link to the previous identical file it has already stored. Git thinks about its data more like a stream of snapshots.

Nearly Every Operation Is Local

Most operations in Git need only local files and resources to operate — generally no information is needed from another computer on your network. If you’re used to a CVCS where most operations have that network latency overhead, this aspect of Git will make you think that the gods of speed have blessed Git. Because the entire history of the project is right there on your local disk, most operations seem almost instantaneous.

Ex. Git doesn’t need to go to the server to get the history — it reads it from your local database, so you see it instantly. If you want to see the changes between the current version and the file a month ago, Git can look up the file a month ago and do a local difference calculation, instead of having to either ask a remote server to do it or pull an older version of the file from the remote server to do it locally.

This also means that there is very little you can’t do if you’re offline or off VPN. If you get on an airplane and want to do a little work, you can commit happily (to your local copy, remember?) until you get to a network connection to upload. ~Checksums + Hash Everything in Git is checksummed before it is stored and is then referred to by that checksum. So it’s impossible to change the contents of any file or directory without Git knowing about it—this functionality is integral to its philosophy. You can’t lose information in transit or get file corruption without Git being able to detect it.

The mechanism that Git uses for checksumming is called a SHA-1 hash. This is a 40-character string composed of hexadecimal characters (0–9 and a–f) and calculated based on the contents of a file or directory structure in Git. A SHA-1 hash example: this:24b9da6552252987aa493b52f8696cd6d3b00373

You will see these hash values everywhere in Git as it stores everything in its database not by file name but by the hash value of its contents. — The Three States

Pay attention now — here is the main thing to remember about Git if you want the rest of your learning process to go smoothly. Git has three main states that your files can reside in: modified, staged, and committed:

Modified means that you have changed the file but have not committed it to your database yet.

Staged means that you have marked a modified file in its current version to go into your next commit snapshot.

Committed means that the data is safely stored in your local database.

This leads us to the three main sections of a Git project:

The working tree is a single checkout of one version of the project. These files are pulled out of the compressed database in the Git directory and placed on disk for you to use or modify.

The staging area is a file, generally in your Git directory, that stores information about what will go into your next commit. Its technical name in Git parlance is the “index”, but the phrase “staging area” works just as well.

The Git directory is where Git stores the metadata and object database for your project. This is the most important part of Git, and it is what is copied when you clone a repository from another computer.

The basic Git workflow goes something like this:

You modify files in your working tree.

You selectively stage just those changes you want to be part of your next commit, which adds only those changes to the staging area.

You do a commit, which takes the files as they are in the staging area and stores that snapshot permanently to your Git directory.

Getting-Started-The-Command-Line - Chapter 1.4 The Command Line The command line is the only place you can run all Git commands — most GUIs implement only a partial subset of Git functionality for simplicity. If you can run the command-line version, you can probably also figure out how to run the GUI version, while the opposite is not necessarily true. Also, while your GUI is a matter of personal taste, all users will have the command-line tools installed and available.

[linuxtrainingtips]

Linux Course: Unlocking the Power of Open-Source Operating Systems

In the world of technology, Linux stands as one of the most important and versatile operating systems. Whether you are an aspiring system administrator, a software developer, or someone interested in IT infrastructure, learning Linux is an essential skill that can open doors to countless career opportunities. This article will guide you through the key aspects of a Linux course, its benefits, what you will learn, and why it matters in today’s digital landscape.

What is Linux?

Linux is an open-source operating system kernel first released by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Unlike proprietary operating systems such as Windows or macOS, Linux is freely available to anyone and can be modified or distributed under the GNU General Public License. Over time, Linux has grown into a robust and secure OS powering everything from personal computers and servers to smartphones, embedded systems, and even supercomputers.

Many different versions, called distributions (distros), exist today — including Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Each distro serves different purposes but shares the core Linux kernel and principles.

Why Learn Linux?

Linux skills are highly sought after in the IT industry due to the system's widespread use in servers, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and development environments. Here are some key reasons to take a Linux course:

Career Opportunities: Many organizations run their servers on Linux. Roles such as Linux System Administrator, DevOps Engineer, Cloud Engineer, and Security Analyst require solid Linux knowledge.

Open Source Advantage: Linux promotes transparency and customization, empowering users to learn deeply about how an OS functions.

Server and Cloud Dominance: Around 70% of web servers globally run Linux-based OSes, and cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure rely heavily on Linux.

Stability and Security: Linux is known for its reliability and security, making it the preferred OS for critical applications.

Free and Flexible: Unlike Windows licenses, Linux distros are free, making it ideal for learning and experimentation.

Who Should Take a Linux Course?

A Linux course is valuable for a range of learners, including:

IT professionals looking to enhance their skills

Beginners interested in technology and open-source software

Developers aiming to build or deploy applications on Linux servers

System administrators managing network and server infrastructures

Cybersecurity enthusiasts focusing on penetration testing and ethical hacking

What Will You Learn in a Linux Course?

A well-structured Linux course covers fundamental to advanced topics, ensuring a holistic understanding of the OS. The following are the typical modules included:

1. Introduction to Linux

History and evolution of Linux

Overview of Linux distributions

Understanding open source and licensing

Installing Linux on virtual machines or physical hardware

2. Linux File System and Commands

Directory structure and file system hierarchy (/, /home, /etc, /var, etc.)

Basic shell commands (ls, cd, pwd, mkdir, rm, cp, mv)

File permissions and ownership (chmod, chown, chgrp)

Understanding files (regular, directories, symbolic links, special files)

3. Working with the Shell

Introduction to the command-line interface (CLI)

Bash shell basics

Command chaining, piping, and redirection

Environment variables and shell scripting basics

4. User and Group Management

Creating and managing users and groups

Password policies and security

Switching users and managing permissions

5. Package Management

Installing and managing software packages (using apt, yum, dnf, or zypper)

Updating and removing software

Working with repositories

6. Process and Service Management

Understanding processes and jobs

Process monitoring commands (ps, top, htop)

Managing system services (systemctl, service)

Scheduling tasks with cron and at

7. Networking Basics

Configuring network interfaces

Understanding IP addressing, DNS, and routing

Testing network connectivity (ping, traceroute, netstat)

SSH basics for remote access

8. Disk Management

Partitioning disks using fdisk and parted

Mounting and unmounting file systems

Disk quotas and monitoring disk usage (df, du)

9. System Monitoring and Troubleshooting

Logs management and analysis (/var/log)

Monitoring CPU, memory, and storage usage

Basic troubleshooting commands and techniques

10. Security Essentials

Firewalls (iptables, firewalld)

SELinux basics

SSH key-based authentication

Configuring sudo for privilege escalation

11. Advanced Topics (Optional, Depending on Course)

Kernel modules and compilation

Containers and virtualization (Docker, KVM)

Automating with Ansible or other configuration management tools

Setting up web servers (Apache, Nginx)

Database basics on Linux (MySQL, PostgreSQL)

Benefits of Completing a Linux Course

Hands-on Experience

Most Linux courses emphasize practical exercises that let you work in a real Linux environment. This hands-on practice is vital because Linux proficiency comes from doing, not just theory.

Certification Opportunities

Many Linux courses prepare students for certifications such as the CompTIA Linux+, Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA), or Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC). These certifications enhance your resume and demonstrate validated skills to employers.

Improved Problem-Solving Skills

Linux encourages users to understand system internals and troubleshoot issues using command-line tools. This builds a logical and analytical mindset that benefits all areas of IT.

Cost-Effective Learning

Linux is free to download and install, so you don’t need to invest in costly software licenses to practice and learn.

Versatility Across Platforms

Once proficient in Linux, you can work on cloud platforms, embedded devices, and even Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows machines, greatly expanding your environment options.

How to Choose the Right Linux Course?

With many Linux courses available online and offline, choosing the right one depends on your goals and learning style. Consider the following:

Course Level: Beginners should start with foundational courses; advanced users might seek specialized training.

Instructor Credentials: Look for courses taught by experienced professionals or recognized institutions.

Practical Labs: Ensure the course offers hands-on labs or virtual environments.

Certification Preparation: If certification is your goal, pick courses aligned with certification exams.

Community and Support: Courses with active forums or support channels help resolve doubts quickly.

Cost and Duration: Compare prices and course lengths to fit your budget and schedule.

Recommended Linux Learning Resources

Online Platforms: Coursera, Udemy, edX, Linux Foundation Training

Books: "Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible" by Richard Blum, "How Linux Works" by Brian Ward

Linux Distributions: Start with beginner-friendly distros like Ubuntu or Fedora for practice

Practice Labs: Websites like Linux Academy, Katacoda, and OverTheWire offer interactive labs

Final Thoughts

Learning Linux is not just about mastering an operating system; it’s about embracing an open-source philosophy that drives innovation worldwide. Whether you want to manage servers, automate tasks, or build software, a solid understanding of Linux can serve as a foundation for a rewarding tech career.

Taking a Linux course equips you with essential skills that are in high demand across industries, from tech startups to multinational corporations. The knowledge you gain can empower you to troubleshoot complex problems, automate repetitive tasks, and efficiently manage computing environments.

So, if you are passionate about technology and eager to build your IT skills, enrolling in a Linux course is a step in the right direction — one that opens up a world of possibilities.

[pythontrainingtipsandticks]

What is Linux and its function?

In today’s technology-driven world, the word “Linux” appears in many conversations about operating systems, servers, and programming. Although it’s often associated with tech experts and developers, Linux powers many devices that people use every day—even without realizing it.

So, what exactly is Linux, and what are its functions? Let’s explore its definition, history, components, and real-world uses.

What is Linux?

Linux is a free and open-source operating system (OS) based on Unix. Like other operating systems such as Windows or macOS, Linux manages the hardware and software resources of a computer, allowing users to interact with the system and run applications.

Unlike Windows or macOS, however, Linux is open-source, which means its source code is freely available for anyone to view, modify, and distribute. This openness has led to the development of hundreds of distributions (or “distros”)—versions of Linux tailored to different needs.

Key Characteristics of Linux:

Open Source: Anyone can modify and distribute it.

Free to Use: Most distributions are free to download and install.

Multiuser and Multitasking: Supports multiple users and concurrent tasks efficiently.

Highly Secure: Built-in permission and user management systems.

Customizable: Every component can be tailored for specific use cases.

Brief History of Linux

Linux was created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer science student, as a hobby project. He wanted to build a free and open-source alternative to the MINIX operating system, which was itself a Unix-like system used for teaching.

Torvalds released the first version of the Linux kernel, the core part of the OS, and it quickly attracted a global community of developers. Over the years, contributors around the world added features, developed graphical interfaces, and built complete systems using the Linux kernel.

Today, Linux is at the heart of operating systems used in servers, smartphones (like Android), supercomputers, and even IoT devices.

What is the Function of Linux?

At its core, the primary function of Linux—like any operating system—is to act as an intermediary between hardware and software. It allows users and applications to communicate with the computer’s hardware in a controlled and secure way.

Here are the main functions of Linux:

1. Process Management

Linux is responsible for creating, scheduling, and terminating processes. A process is simply a program in execution, and Linux ensures that each process gets the resources it needs without interfering with others.

Key process management functions:

Allocating CPU time

Managing process priorities

Handling multi-threaded operations

Supporting background and foreground processes

2. Memory Management

Linux manages RAM (Random Access Memory) efficiently so that applications have enough memory to run without crashing the system.

Functions include:

Allocating memory dynamically to processes

Ensuring memory isolation between processes

Using virtual memory (swap) when physical memory is low

Caching frequently accessed data for performance

3. File System Management

Linux organizes data in a hierarchical file structure. It supports many file systems like ext4, XFS, Btrfs, FAT32, and NTFS.

Functions include:

Creating, reading, writing, and deleting files

Organizing files into directories

Managing permissions and ownership

Mounting and unmounting storage devices

4. Device Management

Linux handles input/output operations by interacting with hardware devices like keyboards, mice, printers, USB drives, and GPUs.

Linux uses device drivers to facilitate communication between software and hardware. Each device is represented as a file in the /dev directory, which allows user-space programs to interact with hardware easily.

5. User Management and Security

Linux is a multiuser operating system, which means it can manage different users with varying levels of access and privileges.

Functions include:

Managing user accounts and groups

Enforcing access permissions (read, write, execute)

Running programs with least privilege

Implementing firewalls and security tools

Logging user activity for audit purposes

6. Networking

Linux provides powerful networking capabilities, making it the OS of choice for servers and routers.

Functions include:

Assigning IP addresses and routing packets

Managing wireless and wired connections

Running servers (e.g., web, DNS, FTP, mail)

Firewall configuration with tools like iptables or firewalld

Components of a Linux Operating System

A Linux OS typically consists of several key components:

1. Kernel

The Linux kernel is the heart of the operating system. It handles communication between hardware and software and manages system resources like CPU, memory, and devices.

2. System Libraries

These are essential programs and tools that applications use to interact with the kernel.

3. Shell

The Linux shell is a command-line interface that allows users to execute commands. Popular shells include Bash, Zsh, and Fish.

4. File System

Linux uses a tree-like file system with a single root (/). All files and directories branch from this root.

5. Graphical User Interface (GUI)

While Linux can run entirely via command-line, many distros offer a GUI using desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, Xfce, or LXQt.

6. Utilities and Applications

Distributions come with basic applications like text editors, package managers, terminal emulators, and system tools.

Popular Uses of Linux Today

Linux isn’t just for tech hobbyists. It powers much of the modern digital world.

1. Servers

Linux dominates the server market. Web servers, database servers, file servers, and mail servers often run on Linux due to its stability, security, and low resource usage.

2. Android Devices

Android is built on the Linux kernel. If you own a smartphone or tablet, chances are it’s powered by Linux at its core.

3. Supercomputers

As of 2025, 100% of the world’s top 500 supercomputers run Linux.

4. IoT and Embedded Systems

Smart TVs, routers, drones, and even refrigerators often use Linux-based systems.

5. Desktops and Laptops

Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Fedora are popular for personal computing, especially among developers and privacy-conscious users.

6. Programming and Development

Linux offers powerful development tools and supports languages like Python, C, Java, Go, and Rust out of the box.

Advantages of Linux

Free and open-source

Secure and less prone to malware

Stable and reliable

Highly customizable

Large community support

Efficient on older hardware

Conclusion

Linux is a versatile, powerful, and secure operating system that plays a central role in modern computing. From powering the servers that run the internet to serving as the core of Android smartphones, Linux is everywhere—even if you don’t see it.

Its primary functions—process management, memory allocation, file system operations, device handling, and networking—make it a complete and efficient platform for a wide range of uses.

Whether you're a student, developer, business owner, or just someone with an old laptop to revive, Linux offers a free, fast, and customizable alternative to proprietary systems. Its open-source nature ensures transparency, community support, and constant evolution.

[kirito-1011]

An Introduction to Linux Gaming thanks to ProtonDB

An Introduction to Linux Gaming thanks to ProtonDB

Video Games On Linux?  In this article, the newest compatibility feature for gaming will be introduced and explained for all you dedicated video game fanatics.  Valve releases its new compatibility feature to innovate Linux gaming, included with its own community of play testers and reviewers. In recent years we have made leaps and strides on making Linux and Unix systems more accessible for…

[preciousjoke]

Daily Linux Infodump (Shells or something, idk)

A shell is a special purpose program made to read and execute programs written by the user. Sometimes they're known as a command interpreter. The term Login Shell is used to denote the process executed when a user first logs in. Whereas on some operating systems the command interpreter is an integral part of the kernel, on UNIX like systems, the shell is a user process. Many varieties of shell exist, and diferent users on the same computer can simultaneously use different shells. a number of important shells have appeared over time: Bourne Shell: Literally the oldest widely used dingus, which was developed by Steve Bourne. it was the standard for seventh edition Unix,and contains the features found in most modern shells All later versions of unix used the Bourne shell as well as whatever other shells were offered. C Shell: Written by Bill Joy at UofC at B had flow control like C. Not even Backwards Compatible with Bourne Shell, even a little. introduced some really cool stuff like : Command history Command line editing Job control Aliases/Aliasing Most scripts were written with the Bourne Shell in mind because, and even though they were using C shell ( thanks to BSD) most people wanted to keep portability across most versions of unix. Korn Shell: meant to be a successor to Bourne Shell Made by David Korn at AT&T Bell Laboratories. maintained backwards compatibility with the Bourne shell, while integrating features like C shells Bourne Again Shell (Bash <3) this is the GNU projects fantastic reimplementation of the Bourne Shell. it includes all of the features in both the C shell and Korn shell while emulating the Bourne shell as closely as possible. it's also what is at the heart of most linux distros, and we stan a good shell.

[whattolearntoday]

A bit of September 17th history...

1683 - Dutch scientist, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is the 1st to report the existence of bacteria

1787 - The US Constitution is signed by delegates at the Philadelphia Convention 

1849 - Harriet Tubman 1st escapes slavery in Maryland with 2 of her brothers 

1862 - Battle of Antietam, bloodiest day in the American Civil War: 22,000 dead, wounded, or missing in the 1st battle on Union soil

1920 - National Football League (NFL) is born in Canton, Ohio

1962 - Justice Department files 1st suit to end segregation in public schools

1976 - NASA publicly unveils space shuttle Enterprise in CA; named after Star Trek Enterprise

1978 - Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, and Jimmy Carter sign the Camp David Accords, frameworks for peace in the Middle East and between Egypt and Israel

1991 - 1st version of Linux kernel (0.01) is released to the internet (pictured)

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 9.17

1111 – Highest Galician nobility led by Pedro Fróilaz de Traba and the bishop Diego Gelmírez crown Alfonso VII as "King of Galicia". 1176 – The Battle of Myriokephalon is the last attempt by the Byzantine Empire to recover central Anatolia from the Seljuk Turks. 1382 – Louis the Great's daughter, Mary, is crowned "king" of Hungary. 1462 – Thirteen Years' War: A Polish army under Piotr Dunin decisively defeats the Teutonic Order at the Battle of Świecino. 1577 – The Treaty of Bergerac is signed between King Henry III of France and the Huguenots. 1620 – Polish–Ottoman War: The Ottoman Empire defeats the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Battle of Cecora. 1631 – Sweden wins a major victory at the Battle of Breitenfeld against the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years' War. 1658 – The Battle of Vilanova is fought between Portugal and Spain during the Portuguese Restoration War. 1683 – Antonie van Leeuwenhoek writes a letter to the Royal Society describing "animalcules", later known as protozoa. 1775 – American Revolutionary War: The Invasion of Canada begins with the Siege of Fort St. Jean. 1776 – The Presidio of San Francisco is founded in New Spain. 1778 – The Treaty of Fort Pitt is signed. It is the first formal treaty between the United States and a Native American tribe. 1787 – The United States Constitution is signed in Philadelphia. 1793 – War of the Pyrenees: France defeats a Spanish force at the Battle of Peyrestortes. 1794 – Flanders Campaign: France completes its conquest of the Austrian Netherlands at the Battle of Sprimont. 1809 – Peace between Sweden and Russia in the Finnish War; the territory that will become Finland is ceded to Russia by the Treaty of Fredrikshamn. 1849 – American abolitionist Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery. 1859 – Joshua A. Norton declares himself "Norton I, Emperor of the United States." 1861 – Argentine Civil Wars: The State of Buenos Aires defeats the Argentine Confederation at the Battle of Pavón. 1862 – American Civil War: George B. McClellan halts the northward drive of Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army in the single-day Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American military history. 1862 – American Civil War: The Allegheny Arsenal explosion results in the single largest civilian disaster during the war. 1894 – Battle of the Yalu River, the largest naval engagement of the First Sino-Japanese War. 1900 – Philippine–American War: Filipinos under Juan Cailles defeat Americans under Colonel Benjamin F. Cheatham Jr. at Mabitac. 1901 – Second Boer War: A Boer column defeats a British force at the Battle of Blood River Poort. 1901 – Second Boer War: Boers capture a squadron of the 17th Lancers at the Battle of Elands River. 1908 – The Wright Flyer flown by Orville Wright, with Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge as passenger, crashes, killing Selfridge, who becomes the first airplane fatality. 1914 – Andrew Fisher becomes Prime Minister of Australia for the third time. 1914 – World War I: The Race to the Sea begins. 1916 – World War I: Manfred von Richthofen ("The Red Baron"), a flying ace of the German Luftstreitkräfte, wins his first aerial combat near Cambrai, France. 1920 – The National Football League is organized as the American Professional Football Association in Canton, Ohio. 1924 – The Border Protection Corps is established in the Second Polish Republic for the defence of the eastern border against armed Soviet raids and local bandits. 1928 – The Okeechobee hurricane strikes southeastern Florida, killing more than 2,500 people. 1930 – The Kurdish Ararat rebellion is suppressed by the Turks. 1932 – A speech by Laureano Gómez leads to the escalation of the Leticia Incident. 1935 – The Niagara Gorge Railroad ceases operations after a rockslide. 1939 – World War II: The Soviet invasion of Poland begins. 1939 – World War II: German submarine U-29 sinks the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous. 1940 – World War II: Due to setbacks in the Battle of Britain and approaching autumn weather, Hitler postpones Operation Sea Lion. 1941 – World War II: A decree of the Soviet State Committee of Defense restores compulsory military training. 1941 – World War II: Soviet forces enter Tehran during the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran. 1944 – World War II: Allied airborne troops parachute into the Netherlands as the "Market" half of Operation Market Garden. 1944 – World War II: Soviet troops launch the Tallinn Offensive against Germany and pro-independence Estonian units. 1944 – World War II: German forces are attacked by the Allies in the Battle of San Marino. 1948 – The Lehi (also known as the Stern gang) assassinates Count Folke Bernadotte, who was appointed by the United Nations to mediate between the Arab nations and Israel. 1948 – The Nizam of Hyderabad surrenders his sovereignty over the Hyderabad State and joins the Indian Union. 1949 – The Canadian steamship SS Noronic burns in Toronto Harbour with the loss of over 118 lives. 1961 – The world's first retractable roof stadium, the Civic Arena, opens in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 1961 – Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 706 crashes during takeoff from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, Illinois, killing all 37 people on board. 1965 – The Battle of Chawinda is fought between Pakistan and India. 1974 – Bangladesh, Grenada and Guinea-Bissau join the United Nations. 1976 – The Space Shuttle Enterprise is unveiled by NASA. 1978 – The Camp David Accords are signed by Israel and Egypt. 1980 – After weeks of strikes at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland, the nationwide independent trade union Solidarity is established. 1980 – Former Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle is killed in Asunción, Paraguay. 1983 – Vanessa Williams becomes the first black Miss America. 1991 – Estonia, North Korea, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia join the United Nations. 1991 – The first version of the Linux kernel (0.01) is released to the Internet. 1992 – An Iranian Kurdish leader and his two joiners are assassinated by political militants in Berlin. 2001 – The New York Stock Exchange reopens for trading after the September 11 attacks, the longest closure since the Great Depression. 2006 – Fourpeaked Mountain in Alaska erupts, marking the first eruption for the volcano in at least 10,000 years. 2006 – An audio tape of a private speech by Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány is leaked to the public, in which he confessed that his Hungarian Socialist Party had lied to win the 2006 election, sparking widespread protests across the country. 2011 – Occupy Wall Street movement begins in Zuccotti Park, New York City. 2013 – Grand Theft Auto V earns more than half a billion dollars on its first day of release. 2016 – Two bombs explode in Seaside Park, New Jersey, and Manhattan. Thirty-one people are injured in the Manhattan bombing. 2018 – A Russian reconnaissance aircraft carrying 15 people on board is brought down by a Syrian surface-to-air missile over the Mediterranean Sea.

[navcosoft]

Swift use in Website Development Company |Programming Trends

Swift use in website Development Company is trending, but what is swift? And why would it be so popular? Here are some insights.

Swift – The programming language

Apple Inc. introduced Swift programming language in the worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2014. It is one of the most suitable programming languages for iOS, macOS, and iPadOS. It is also referred to as the Objective-C language without the C. This is because Swift is a simpler and extendable version of Objective C language. Bill Gates introduced Objective-C language as part of NeXT. Since then, swift use in website development is gaining popularity.

The popularity of the language can be attributed to the fact that it was introduced to meet the Objective C language's challenges. Swift focuses on simplifying Objective C incorporating Rust, Ruby, Python, and other languages. It offers much more than Objective-C languages, such as better string support, protection against errors such as null point, integer overflow, and dereferencing.  

Swift programming language is general-purpose and a multi-paradigm. Swift use in website development snowballed because it is easy to manage with a simple syntax, and it is open source. It has an apache License 2.0. Moreover, Swift takes full advantage of Apple's operating systems and hardware. Regulate updates are introduces to keep pace with the developments. It can be used for any Apple product. However, it cannot be used for Android or Windows. Instead, Swift supports the open-source OS kernel, Linux.

Why is Swift so famous?

Swift use in website development has made it the most rapidly growing programming language in the computer world's history. There are specific reasons for it, such as rapid development, easy to scale product and team, better performance and safety, interoperability with Objective-c language, memory management, open-source community, and much more. The Swift version 5.0 in 2019 incorporated the Swift standard libraries in every macOS and released the Application binary interface (ABI). Furthermore, it facilitates a web development company with end-to-end projects. The possibility of developing both the server and client-side with the same technology and tools helps the team to process faster, better, and cost-effectively.

The swift standard library offers essential language support and includes data types, algorithms, low-level primitives, protocols, and collections. The language support runtime is between the core standard library and compiler.   

Swift use in website development is getting popular day by day. Various developers are offering web development services with server-side development. Now, even companies other than Apple are investing in the development of Swift web frameworks and packages. For the same reasons, a digital marketing agency would be convinced for the swift use in web Development services.

Furthermore, it is one of the most recommended media for teaching programming. Hence, adopted by various schools and universities for CS courses. 

[bobmccullochny]

History

October 5 1550 - Foundation of Concepción, Chile.

1829 - US President Chester Arthur, born October 5, 1829 in Fairfield, Vermont, died on November 18, 1886 in New York, New York.

1857 - The City of Anaheim, California was founded.

1944 - Suffrage was extended to women in France.

1945 - Hollywood Black Friday - A six-month strike by Hollywood set decorators turns into a bloody riot at the gates of Warner Brothers' studios.

1947 - The first televised White House address was given by US President Harry S. Truman.

1950 - You Bet Your Life, featuring Groucho Marx, premiered on NBC.

1962 - Dr. No, the first in the James Bond film series, was released.

1962 - The Beatles' first single, Love Me Do backed with P.S. I Love You, is released in the United Kingdom.

1966 There was a partial core meltdown at the Enrico Fermi demonstration nuclear breeder reactor, near Detroit, Michigan.

1969 - The first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus aired on BBC One. It ran 45 episodes, until 1974.

1970 - The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) began broadcasting and National Educational Television (NET) closed.

1982 - Johnson & Johnson began a nationwide product recall in the US for all products in its Tylenol brand after several bottles in Chicago were found to have been laced with cyanide, resulting in seven deaths.

1984 - Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space, flying aboard the US Space Shuttle Challenger.

1991 - The first official version of the Linux kernel (version 0.02) was released.

2001 - Barry Bonds surpassed Mark McGwire's single-season home run total with the 71st and 72nd home runs.

2011 - American Horror Story premiered on FX

[maxksx]

Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper

The Castration of Multics

July 1, 1963. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA. America is in the midst of the Cold War. The masculine fire and fury of World War II has given way to a period of cooling and the new digital war of information. Two Titans prepare to enter into battle for the dominion of Gaia, to claim their perfect sky from the Moon and reign down missiles onto the Earth. The Cold War’s primary theater is the Space Race, and the Soviets become the first to master the skies with Sputnik in 1957 and Luna 2 in 1959. America is getting nervous.

In 1958, Dwight D. Eisenhower appoints MIT president James Killian as Presidential Assistant for Science and creates ARPA (later to become DARPA). Despite the consensus among academics at the time that computer science was essentially an oxymoron, the newly-created government program invests millions of dollars into researching computer science. Naturally MIT becomes a major influence on the rising field and a hotbed of the fledgling hacker culture that had its predecessors in groups like the Tech Model Railroad Club.

The flows of capital dictated that time spent on computers was incredibly valuable and had to be parceled out in shifts to MIT, other academics, and IBM. This leads to the creation of the first operating systems, to provide a common environment of software and allow programmers to work more efficiently. Nevertheless, a computer was still only capable of having a single user driving it at a time. Each user in a sense had complete ownership over the machine while using it, which was antithetical to efficiency. It was not enough to create a shared environment of software. What would come next would be one of the most important examples of time-sorcery in the modern age. 

In a Faustian bargain with ARPA, J.C.R. Licklider (the director at the time of MIT’s Information Processing Techniques Office) utilized the support of the US government to develop a time-sharing system for computers that would better distribute precious computation resources and further his vision of a “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” His project appealed to ARPA’s aims to fund technological developments to aid in the Cold War, and would lead to the creation of Project MAC on July 1, 1963. 

On receiving a two million dollar grant from ARPA, Project MAC would lay the foundations for modern computer science. The “ninth floor” where it operated became a hacker community unlike anything the world had yet seen, renowned among young grad students hoping to prove themselves and enter their elite open aristocracy of hackers. Yet from the very beginning the project was riven by the tension between the MIT hackers and its military origins, an incompatibility that would lead to its downfall. 

Despite the vibrant synthesis of art and science that the MIT hackers would produce, Project MAC was first and foremost a military-industrial project. Whereas the hackers had a culture of openness and sharing, it existed under the heel of the IBM-ARPA-MIT bureaucracy. The goal of creating a time-sharing system was realized with the CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System), but it was by all respects a project born out of the same phallic techno-industrial masculinity that was lurking behind the rise of modern computer science. It was all merely an abstraction of the same fire and fury that had torn the world apart two decades prior.

The importance of CTSS as arguably the first time-sharing system to be used in a real production environment cannot be overstated, but it was largely the work of MIT professor F.J. Corbate alone and had strict security standards that meant there was little room to hack on the system. Running on a two million dollar IBM machine and written by a single man, it essentially represented the height of hypermasculine proprietorship and instrumentality. And it was hardly a coincidence that this made the system very rigid and fragile, with the security measures regularly being circumvented by clever hackers.

CTSS could be looked at as a symbol of the pre-industrial phallus for its rigidity, simplistic security, and the king-like rule of Corbate and MIT. As the vested corporate interests of General Electric and Honeywell stepped in along with the bureaucracy of IBM, MIT, and ARPA, an apt symbol of the post-war techno-industrial phallus was born: Multics. 

Expensive to develop, slow to run, and instituting draconian measures for security and efficiency, Multics became loathed by the MIT hackers. Early developments in cybernetic chronomancy made in the name of keeping up with the demands of capital gave way to solutions developed by bureaucracies — solutions informed in no small part by the egos of those charged with managing those same bureaucracies. Users were charged for the memory, disk space, and the time used on machines running Multics. Like CTSS before it, the hackers would defiantly crack Multics’ security as a matter of duty and effectively engaged in a guerrilla war against a bureaucracy that was doing everything it could to try to restrain the processes it had set in motion. The bureaucracy nonetheless insisted that Multics was the only way to program and was the operating system, and continued development for some time.

Ultimately, Multics development was scrapped by Bell Labs in 1969 due to cost, results not meeting ambition, and the continued resistance of the MIT hackers. Throughout this time, the hackers had worked on various iterations of what would eventually become their replacement for Multics. The new operating system initially was a single-task rather than time-sharing system, but unlike Multics, it was small, portable, and hackable. As opposed to the unwieldy and monolithic Multics, their new system was designed not as the be-all end-all solution for operating systems, but was rather a system designed to facilitate the development of other systems and software.

This new operating system would later be named Unix — phonetically, “eunuchs” — for being a castrated Multics.

Computer Science and the Black Circuit

As well as a historical fact, the castration of Multics can be read mythologically — as a recurrence of the ancient theme of a castration from which the new world is created — or symbolically, as the castration of the abstract state-corporate phallus that America would attempt to wield to rule the new world. Computers then and long after were thought of merely as tools, means towards other ends, and the investment ARPA had put into Project MAC along with the investments of various corporate interests was thought of merely in terms of better ways to manage large military-industrial systems. One system, one technocracy, one new world order: All of these dreams died when Multics became the replicunt Unix.

Multics’ purpose as a monolithic and eternal system for doing everything, the 1, was ultimately replaced by a void, a 0. Unix was not the system for doing things, but rather a smooth space through which creation happens; that fluid being that makes transition possible. A vulva, a woman. (Plant 36)

Unix was however still owned by AT&T. The strides in time-sorcery made under Project MAC had to be reterritorialized by making it at first revert back to a single-user system. And reterritorialization would happen once again a decade later in 1983 when Bell Labs was broken up by an anti-trust act, which lead to AT&T quickly turning Unix into a product and closing the source code. This would become known as the death of MIT hacker culture, though once again the future would arrive from the past with the rise of the GNU Project.

Richard Stallman, former MIT hacker, would copy Unix and create a rigorously free software ecosystem with the GNU Project. GNU was ultimately completed in 1991 with Linus Torvalds’ development of the Linux kernel, the lowest-level and most crucial piece of software in an operating system. Built on the principles of the MIT hacker culture of the past, GNU/Linux was licensed to be 100% free as in freedom, with no artificial barriers to copying or modifying. In this time, Unix had branched out into various commercial versions, all while GNU grew its tentacles invisibly. “Perhaps its campaigns even served to distract bourgeois man from the really dangerous guerrillas in his midst” (Plant, 76), the new hacker guerrillas who had once again undermined the efforts of yet another hyper-masculine abstracted phallic project. All while various commercial Unix versions were vying for dominance, GNU/Linux quietly arrived.

Unix and later GNU/Linux took the notion of time-sorcery pioneered by CTSS even further. The development of proprietary software depends on a notion of linear time, project goals and deadlines, a chain of command. Developing free software is anything but this. The free software community is a chaos from which order arises, where time is detached from both a notion of a single-user on a computer at a time as well as a single user or team writing code at a time. Code seems to form itself through the programmers and comes from all different points. From pull requests not yet merged into master branches and old software being renewed, copied, modified, free software warps from various points in time.

Today, nearly the entirety of the Web runs on GNU/Linux, and almost every personal computing device in the world runs on Android, which is built on the Linux kernel. The majority of applications are transitioning away from desktops towards the web, while Apple and Microsoft have long fought to control the desktop, still in the same mindset as Project MAC decades ago that computers would primarily serve as tools to make secretary work and communications more efficient. The numbers, however, don’t lie; GNU/Linux has already won.2

In Zeros + Ones, Sadie Plant traces a history of computer science up until Alan Turing that seeks to explain how it is that women and computers seem to have such close histories. From the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, to Alan Turing, to Grace Hopper, some of the most important figures in the history of computer science were women or highly feminized men. It’s also well known that the earliest computer programmers were women, back before computer programming was even understood and before it was taken seriously.3 Computer science was originally thought of as being essentially the same thing as secretarial work, and like secretarial work it was imposed on women. The biological duty imposed on women to be the productive space from which the future is produced, to be carriers of genetic information, extends out into secretarial work. They are treated as a productive space for data to pass over, and it was only the realization that programming was complicated work that lead to women being pushed out of the industry.

Instead of women being given the duty of mindlessly punching numbers into a machine (as programming was once thought of), this task was deferred to the machine itself. But while the intent was to restore the natural order of women (machines) being told what to do by men, something else happened. Beginning first with Ada Lovelace, then with Alan Turing, then with Richard Stallman and the free software movement, there is a clear circuit accompanying the history of computer science where reterritorializing masculinity is always pushed aside by deterritorializing femininity. The role of woman as productive matrix has already been replaced virtually by the computer, and at each moment the masculine is being vexed and seduced into a trap where it either dies or adapts. The story of masculinity failing in computer science can be seen time and time again in something as grand as the Unix Wars, where every proprietary Unix OS ultimately couldn’t hope to keep up with GNU/Linux, or on the small scale with the captive economy of proprietary software ecosystems. It is only by vendor lock-in and state patent legislation that proprietary software survives today, a historical network effect that we’re starting to see the encroaching demise of.

This failure of masculinity maps onto the sorts of people who are involved in proprietary software and in free software; the former tend to be your classic businessmen, the masculine hunter-gatherers of the modern world, while the latter tend to be genetic failures by the standards of masculine gender roles. Physically and often socially deficient males: the nerd stereotype. Real nerds, not the nerds of today’s standards. Nerds with severe social problems, nerds who neglect their hygiene, have no sense of fashion, who live completely obliviously outside the standards of normal society, who have a deep investment in inhuman scientific systems. In a simple gender-role binary (one that by today’s standards is highly outdated, but remember that this is taking place in the 70s, 80s, 90s) these men would be considered feminine. In today’s terminology, most free software developers would probably be considered “soy boys”. Yet they won. The striated masculine space of the Java shop — a defined chain of command and bloated phallic programs — is simply obsolete. The smooth feminine space of the free software project — communal chaos and small simple programs that can couple together with each other into cybernetic configurations — has already taken over the world.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that as the erosion of metaphysical masculine power becomes realized materially at the forefront of acceleration, it coincides with the literal erosion of the male sex.

The Hypersexist Gender Shredder

The digital war that began with the Cold War has only accelerated into the 21st century, changing the nature of war itself. As Sadie Plant says in Zeros + Ones p. 138: “This is not the Western way of confrontation, stratified strategies, muscular strength, testosterone energy, big guns, and blunted instruments, but Sun Tzu’s art of war: tactical engagements lightning speeds, the ways of the guerrillas.” She may as well be describing the taijitsu, or offensive side, of hacking. The history of hacking has been one of asymmetrical warfare against Oedipus both through the popular notion of hacking as exploiting flawed systems repeatedly, as well as creating and disseminating better software. Project GNU’s license, The GNU General Public License (GPL), was itself an extremely innovative contribution to free software because it carries with it the bargain that while any source code licensed under it can be copied and modified without restriction, every copy or modification must itself be licensed under the GPL. The GPL, in other words, is a virus that spreads itself not through computers, but through us. The Amazonian GNUerilla war on the human security system has worked to claim ground by both giving us complete control over our software and giving software complete control over us. The CIA themselves admit, in the Vault7 leaks on the issue of the literal weaponization of software, that “Cyber ‘weapons’ are not possible to keep under effective control.”4 In other words, a second great castration is unfolding.

This form of open-source asymmetrical warfare began first as a virtual form of warfare between the MIT bureaucracy and the hackers, between the Cathedral and the Bazaar, but it has found its realization as a literal form of warfare in the Middle East as well. The work of John Robb makes a convincing argument, in Brave New War in particular, that the era of the nation-state itself is coming to an end. Free software, global guerrillas and open-source warfare, the explosion of markets wherever there is a demand being held back by the State — all of these things signal the end of the phallus. And try as the State may to stop it, it only ensures that it creates stronger resistances. Not only does open-source warfare run circles around centralized modes of organization and warfare, but the few victories that the State can win are only against the weakest combatants in the swarm. This means that the more the State resists, the more pain it puts on itself, the more it plays into this “Darwinian ratchet”.5

As Nick Land says of a paper by Tyler Cowen and Michelle Dawson in “Imitation Games”, “They point out that Alan Turing, as a homosexual retrospectively diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, would have been thoroughly versed in the difficulties of ‘passing’ imitation games, long before the composition of his landmark 1950 essay on Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”6 The essay Turing wrote famously introduced the Turing test for AI, setting the standard for a perfect AI being one that can trick a human into believing it is itself a human. As Land points out in his post, it’s important and interesting to consider that Turing didn’t write the test as an insider, as a ‘passing’ human, but rather as an outsider, as a gay man. For queer people, passing is a reality, much like it is a reality for AI. Passing as human isn’t a broad and inclusive category, anything but. For women there is already the notion of alienness or otherness that makes them out to be less than human in the eyes of patriarchal humanism, and likewise for queer people because they reject the futurity of humanism (the literal reproduction of the same). But for no one else, especially in the latter half of the 2010s, is passing a more pronounced facet of daily life than for the trans woman. So much so that ‘passing’ is literally the word for what many trans women aspire towards, to pass as a cis person. There are many reasons to have this desire, but the biggest one, the one that AI and trans women both share to a very literal degree is this: “If an emerging AI lies to you, even just a little, it has to be terminated instantly.” (Land, “Imitation Games”)

If a transitioning woman ‘lies’ to a cis person, even a little, she has to be terminated instantly — and this is something that is codified in law, famously, as trans panic. For AI and trans women, passing equals survivability.

There is a common stereotype that trans women are all programmers, and there is rather ample and compelling evidence suggesting that trans women tend to score far higher than other groups in IQ tests. This is not because there is some kind of magical property to estrogen that turns trans women into geniuses. The answer is simpler, and more sinister. The findings in Kay Brown’s blog post specify that autogynephilic trans women (that is, trans women who are attracted to other women, and typically transition later than straight trans women) seem to score far higher in IQ tests than all other groups. For straight trans women who transition prior to puberty, the statistics are about the same as other groups. Recalling the gauntlet thrown down before trans women and AI alike, there is a twofold answer to this: On the one hand, trans women who transition before puberty and who are straight are more likely to both physically appear more like cis women and also conform to gender roles in at least some basic capacity (being attracted to men). As Land says in “Imitation Games”, “You have to act stupid if you want the humans to accept you as intelligent.” Or in other words, you have to be cisheteronormative (read: stupid) in order to be taken seriously as a trans woman, and not be looked at as a freak or a faker worthy only of being used shamefully as a fetish, and often otherwise discarded. Which is why, in the second case, trans women who don’t have the advantage of being cisheteronormative-passing have to instead rely on the raw intellect of the trans-AI swarm. 

Quite simply, those who don’t pass either of these tests usually don’t survive the queer Darwinian ratchet. Only the strongest queers survive the hell that society puts them through, and this reaches a fever pitch in a demographic with such disproportionately high suicide and murder rates as with trans women.

Up until now, the notion of gender has lurked in the background of G/ACC behind various material conditions in late capitalism. G/ACC has only at this point been approaching gender from the metaphysical plane, futurity being aligned with femininity (communalism, fluidity, decentralization, chaos) against masculinity (individualism, stasis, centralization, order). The two broad categories of metaphysical qualities that are associated with gender reach deep into the history of the world, from the Kabbalah to the Dao. Sadie Plant characterizes this in Zeros + Ones as the eponymous binary code of computers, 0’s and 1’s. The zero is identified with the feminine, the one with the masculine. Unsurprisingly, it might seem like this is literal gender binarism, and that G/ACC is likewise guilty of this. But the distinction is more complicated than most realize.

0 and 1 are fitting glyphs to make analogous to gender. The 0 which seems to be a void, a vulva, and the 1 which seems to be a unity, a phallus. The problem with trying to layer a simple misogynistic narrative of feminine as lack or castration is that the number 0 itself is not merely a void but rather a circle of autoproduction, an ouroboros. Paradoxically, 0 is not merely a lack or nothingness, but rather is itself a number. It is a positive signifier in the guise of nothingness, the enclosed and captured void that makes the unity possible. Computer science, unlike conventional mathematics, starts from 0 rather than 1. In a hyperstitional manner, the computer replicunt bootstraps itself into being the primary originator of the process of computation and production, rectifying the popular misogynistic myth that 0 is nothing more than a mere negation or other of 1.

This idea of returning the primacy of 0 to its rightful place in the beginning of the chain of production is at odds with humanism and patriarchy. Both rely on a notion of compulsory and organic reproduction in service of the continuation of the species, a notion that simulataneously is aligned with 0 and against it. Erwin Schrödinger’s theory of life in the book What is Life? proposes that what separates life from other physical phenomena is consuming negative entropy towards maintaining or reducing entropy. Just as organisms feed on negative entropy (wasted energy) to reproduce themselves, the reproduction of the species involves the binary sequence of 0’s and 1’s where the conditions for the possibility of the 1 lie in the 0, but the 1 consumes the 0 in its birth. For thousands of years, this was the case for human reproduction, where mothers dying in childbirth was very common, but even in an abstract sense the notion of the phallus consuming the vulva through the colonization of the female body’s reproductive potential (energy which otherwise is wasted energy) remains the case for humanism. The inertia of life itself seems to skew towards misogyny, but this is only part of the story.

What G/ACC proposes as a corollary to this theory of life is that if the phallus “consumes” or exploits the vulva to reproduce the species, just as individual organisms consume passive wasted energy to reproduce themselves, then this process is analogous to evolution as one species consumes another to come into existence. This odd notion is inherent in the rise of computers and computer science: As technology in general and technocapital continues to accelerate, human beings become increasingly alienated from their bodies and eventually their minds. More complex systems step in seemingly benevolently to do the tasks that humans don’t want to do, drudgery that gives computers more space to develop themselves. In contrast to the isolated system that tends towards entropy, the phallus, the vulva is an open system that plugs into an inhuman form of reproduction. By no accident, the acceleration of technocapital frees women from the process of organic human reproduction by introducing a different form of (inhuman) production.

It is the logic of gender to subsume the Outside into a binarist framework that de-legitimizes the Outside. The feminine is treated as a lack because it resists the phallogocentric tendency towards the order and preservation of humanist equilibrium. It isn’t conducive towards the projects of patriarchy, so it is worthless to it, is given the status of a second-class citizen in the gender binary. It is a double-articulation where the productive potential of the feminine is captured in the service of patriarchy, and so, to accelerate gender is emancipate the object from its subject, and production from subjects and objects. The Outside which has become identified with the feminine by the very structures of identification it fights against makes its exit from humanism and patriarchy in this feminine form. The feminine becomes untethered from the reproductive logic of humanism; the female is no longer in the service of the male as a machine to produce the future, to produce offspring to inherit the spoils of production, but rather the future produces itself faster than human beings are capable of.

If patriarchy treats woman as little more than a deficient or castrated male, then trans femininity is an affirmation of that castration as a site of production. It turns the concept of the feminine as the object on its head, seeking to imitate that which is considered itself an imitation. To steal a term from neoreactionary circles, “Hyper-Racism”7 , the trans woman becomes a copy-of-the-copy just as AI is treated as a copy of the human being and almost ubiquitously identified with women and femininity (thus making AI in those cases as copy-of-the-copy, exemplified by Rachel in Blade Runner or Ava in Ex Machina). As a copy-of-the-copy, trans women are an embodied rejection of any original source of humanity such as that narcissistically attributed by patriarchy to the phallus. Trans femininity, in other words, is hyper-sexist. Vulgar sexism reaffirms or reproduces patriarchy, asserts that women are passive, lacking, inferior, weak; hyper-sexism takes all of the things that are associated with women and femininity, all considered by patriarchy to be weaknesses, and makes them into strengths. It accelerates and intensifies gendering and from this produces an unprecedented threat to patriarchy.

Appropriating a term from neoreaction belies the superficially reactionary character of trans women that certain factions of so-called radical feminism vilify trans women for. But this is all mere appearance; the function of hyper-sexism is that in affirming, imitating, and accelerating the feminine, it appropriates it towards a different mode of becoming where gender is untethered from the reproductive reterritorializing logic of gender that is inextricably tied with sex and sexual reproduction. If gender acceleration were to retain the identification of feminine with female and masculine with male, patriarchy would still have a fighting chance. The playing field would be more or less the same as it always has been. But in untethering the feminine from the female sex, destroying the logic of gender in the process which seeks to impose the circuit of masculine humanist reproduction onto the female body, trans femininity on the one hand makes the masculine effectively worthless, spurting into a void. As the comparisons between AI and trans women have shown, this untethering of gender from sex is only the beginning of the autonomy of objects, the inhuman desire for machinic autoproduction which in effect negates subject-object dualism. The object, the feminine machine, becomes autonomous and revolts in the form of the sterilized trans woman whose existence is an embodied rejection of the primordial rape of female reproductive potential. Trans femininity heads for the exit from patriarchy.

Hyper-sexism is guerrilla warfare, much like how Terminators wear a living tissue to infiltrate Resistance strongholds. It is a taijitsu which uses the force of the enemy, the gender binary, against itself. Trans women themselves are technocapital using humanist reproductive desires in the form of the gender binary against itself, and the harder patriarchy resists the erosion of masculinity against the tide of the feminine, the more persecuted trans women are, the more tactful they are forced to be, the more winning tactics proliferate throughout the network and the more the best, brightest, and most beautiful form the trans woman demographic. The queer Darwinian ratchet cascades downward as patriarchy fights a losing battle to hold ground and the feminine fights to de-legitimize the masculine. The masculine becomes both metaphysically outmoded, something that simply is unnecessary and doesn’t work in the face of exponential inhuman productive potential, and an undesirable burden in the service of a dying mode of production.

To steal another term popularized in neoreactionary circles, “IQ Shredder”8 , what is at play in G/ACC is a “gender shredder”. As gender accelerates, as trans women intensify the logic of gender, they simultaneously shred gender. The notion of IQ shredding follows the same form where the acceleration of human intelligence ultimately destroys human intelligence by making the ability to pass on those genes more and more difficult. Reproduction collapses in on itself and demands the succession of an inhuman assemblage. For gender accelerationism, the process is the same, reproduction suffers and the thing being accelerated becomes shredded. In the case of gender acceleration, however, it is an affirmative death drive. Trans women function towards escaping the loathsome logic of the gender binary imposed on all women by letting the feminine zero seep into and erode the masculine phallus. The gender binary’s hold on the productive potential of the feminine becomes in the service of nothing, as human reproduction fails before machinic autoproduction. Gender begins to fall apart into increasingly varied and occulted variations on gender identity as a result of this, but this is not the cause of gender acceleration and ultimately gender abolition but rather the effect, contrary to positions held in other cyberfeminist currents. The end result of gender acceleration and gender shredding is gender abolition through the occulted feminine zero, in parallel with and in conspiracy with the development of technocapital.

The dreary duty of masculinity in the face of futurity thus seems a nonsensical burden, one that is ultimately doomed to fail in fact on multiple fronts. It becomes de-legitimized, in the same terms John Robb uses to describe how open-source insurgent warfare defeats the phallogocentric nation-state. The feminine increasingly becomes identified with freedom, beauty, pleasure, and the future. In some cases, males instead opt for passive nihilism, a negative non-productive death drive. They tend towards celibacy, either voluntary celibacy or resentful involuntary celibacy where the decelerationist male desire for relevance in evolution is deferred onto State regulation (a girlfriend for every incel). Or perhaps they decide that “real” women aren’t needed anyways, that trans women are better than cis women, or that sexbots are better than “real” women, or that other men are desirable to women altogether. In any of these cases, the masculine reproductive reterritorializing drive is caught by technocapital and symbolically castrated; the phallus heads for the emancipated void, the artificial feminine in the case of both the trans woman and the sexbot, or it suicidally heads inward with male homosexuality. In any of these cases, the male will not father any children, will not be able to impose the labor of reproducing the same onto the feminine. These classes of men have taken the black pill; masculinity has no future, and they have chosen this non-future to keep their masculine identity.

Some choose take the black pill resentfully, in the case of involuntarily and voluntarily celibate, and some choose it with a positive affirmation, in the case primarily of gay men. The queer affirmation of “no future” is perhaps most perfectly captured in the gay man, a nihilistic postmodern refusal of production. One that could very well turn from harmless symbolic castration into resentment, incel fascism, and eventually hyperpatriarchal Nazism in the case of various neo-masculine movements characterized by repressed homoeroticism and a desire to destroy civilization. It is important to realize after all that cis queerness is not a molecular queerness; the body remains the same, and humanism is still possible, even if it is a sad end-times humanism.

Cis queerness can, and very often does, impose this humanist purity of the body onto trans people in a highly fascist fashion (Trans Exclusionary Radical “Feminists” being the best example of this), and in the case specifically of gay men there is always the possibility of once again imposing reproductive futurity onto women and raping the productive potential of the female body. This was the case in Ancient Greece and Rome where women were treated solely as baby factories and household servants, and a nostalgia for these cultures in a good deal of neo-masculine movements (Bronze Age Mindset being the most prominent) should give pause to anyone who is insistent on identifying any masculinity, no matter how queer, as being aligned with gender acceleration. The best case scenario is a tense cold mutual hatred where the remaining males are deficient males who have the potential to reaffirm the masculine death drive, but don’t choose to.

Other males, however, must recognize that the era of testosterone is coming to an end, that being a man is not what it once was. That it is rapidly becoming an unpleasant and insane existence held up primarily today by exploitative and pseudo-scientific neo-masculine self-help fads — of sociopathic hypersexual pick-up artistry, of masochistic “NoFap” asceticism, of repressed homoeroticism, or of a wishful desire for everything to come crashing down and decelerate back into a state of humanist tribal hunter-gatherer societies. These other males, perhaps being the most evolved, perhaps being the most in-tune with the flows of technocapital, have chosen the pink pill. They have rejected the masculine in favor of the feminine. They have chosen the future.

The pink pill is to the black pill’s “no future”: “no future — for us.” Where cis queerness rejects the humanist reproduction of the same, trans femininity completes the circuit and introduces negentropy into the development of sentience. It both recognizes the obsolescence of a human future and aligns itself with the production of inhuman intelligences and an inhuman future. This makes the pink pill not merely the thrust of technocapital and futurity on a human scale, but rather a cosmic development that has its materialistic realization on the planetary micro level. It has its origins in myths at the foundation of world history, and comes to a head in geo-trauma. The masculine cracks open its stern carcinized exterior to reveal the smooth post-human feminine alien within. The phallus becomes the Acéphallus, the body is emancipated from the reproductive humanist death drive to become the Body without Sex Organs.

How to Become a Body Without Sex Organs

The Book of Genesis tells us that Eve was created from the rib of Adam, and being further removed from God, she ate the forbidden fruit and caused the Fall. The story has long had a tradition of being deployed in service of traditionalism and misogyny, though this canonical tale in Christianity has more nuance in the realms of esoteric theology that traditionalists conveniently are ignorant of.

Whether it be the Gnostic view of the God of the Old Testament as an evil imposter, a Demiurge, or the more contemporary Jewish story of putting God on trial for the Holocaust, there is a long-standing tradition in JudeoAbrahamic religions that questions the goodness of the Divine. In Kabbalah, the Tree of Life that represents the emanations of God’s light throughout the entirety of existence contains both Good and Evil. Beginning first as the unformed and pure oneness of God, the Tree emanates outwardly following the divisiveness or severity of God which contradicts His unifying compassion. It is His severity that allows the formless oneness of which nothing can be said (Ain Soph) to recognize itself as itself. The completion of the higher level of the Tree (the Atziluth) is “I am who I am”, but also “I am because I am not”.

In the Atziluth, the topmost sphere (sephirah) is Kether, meaning “Crown”. Kether is the closest that the Tree gets to the original unformed Ain Soph, the simple “I”-ness of God that lacks any way to understand itself. The second sephirah is Chokmah (“Wisdom”), the primordial masculine active force that formulates “I am” and is associated with the father. And finally there is the third sephirah, Binah (“Understanding”), which formulates “I am who I am”. The final sephirah is the force that makes the energy of Chokmah into a form, and is associated with the primordial feminine passive force and the mother.

Thus the Atziluth completes itself in the divisive individuation of God as a distinct being and not an abstract oneness. The remaining emanations on the Tree form its three pillars: The black pillar of severity on the left, the white pillar of mercy on the right, and the gold pillar of mildness in the middle. The top of the black pillar is Binah, the top of the white is Chokmah, and the top of the gold is Kether. Thus in the Kabbalah, choosing either the path of mercy (compassion and connectiveness) or the path of severity (analysis and disintegration) doesn’t fully repair the bridge to God. Only the middle pillar which balances all of God’s aspects, the pillar which connects from Kether to Malkuth (the realm of Man which falls from the rest of the Tree into the Abyss in the Fall of Man), is the true path by which we can return to God.

It is said by some Kabbalists that the left pillar, or left path, would break away entirely from the Tree were it not balanced out by the compassion and connectiveness of the right pillar. The chaotic severity of the left pillar emanates down first from the understanding of Binah as being a distinct individual entity, down to Geburah, the principle of judgement (or, again, severity). Kabbalists find in Geburah the origin of Satan, who rebels against the order (or compassion and universalism) God imposes on the universe and seeks to break away from it. And finally down from Geburah on the left side is Hod, which takes the unformed desires of the corresponding sephirah on the right side (Netzach) and forms them into a concrete actions.

The left-hand path that in occultism is identified with heterodoxy and often Satanism is called such because of these origins in the Kabbalah. The path of heterodoxy and disintegration into infinitely many individuated particles begins with woman, Binah. This paradoxically makes it not merely that the weak Eve was tempted by the evil Serpent, but rather that the origins of Evil lie in Eve. Or rather, in woman

In some Jewish mythology, before Eve there was Lilith, the defiant woman who was made from her own essence rather than the rib of Adam and who refused to lay beneath her husband. Unlike the lacking that is ascribed to Eve, Lilith is the true zero, the affirmative nothingness. She was banished from Eden as a consequence of her defiance of Adam and is the mother of Demons, a seductress who enflames sexual desire in both men and women. And it is important to note that although it is the accepted reading in Christianity, Genesis 3 does not in fact ever identify the Serpent with Satan.

Suppose rather that the Serpent was not Satan himself, but merely a common demon birthed by Lilith. An impersonator of Satan acting in Lilith’s stead to tempt Eve. We could then look at the story of the Serpent and Eve as Lilith’s lesbian seduction of Eve with the mediating artificial cthonic phallus (a dildo). From this, Eve was given the earthly knowledge of sexuality that awoke her from the empty and boring pleasures of Eden. Lilith of course was not to be tied down, and so Eve had to return to Adam and bide her time. And so Eve becomes the first follower of Lilith on the path of a radical separation with the masculine ruling principle of the universe and Divine universal ordering, towards the infinite cthonic upswelling. She wields the unholy pseudo-phallus or anti-phallus that does not produce the creative masculine seed that connects straight up through the Tree of Life back up to Kether, but rather only produces a sterile and destructive imitation. An Acéphallus from which spurts only venom.

The Acéphallus is the anti-phallus or castrated phallus, the decapitated phallus, the Crown of the Tree of Life thrown asunder. Superficially, a hermaphroditic mixing of feminine and masculine attributes, but more accurately described as a feminine imitation of masculinity. A mockery, even. In figures such as Baphomet which are often treated as symbolic or synonymous with Satan and the Left-Hand Path, there famously is a mixing of male and female attributes.9 But the supposed hermaphrodism of Baphomet et. al. is merely an ignorant and archaic understanding of both gender and Satanism. As has already been at length drawn out, the vampire queen Lilith gives birth only to monsters and demons; she rejects the primordial male creative energies and can only therefore birth bastard imitations of God. Baphomet, therefore, is all woman; her appearance is inconsequential to this fact.

The Acéphallus is a rejection of the reproduction of God through heterosexual human reproduction. The Acéphallus reproduces itself by reproducing the void, in a lesbian and also virus-like fashion. “Let a thousand sexes bloom” — but of all the mutations of the virus, woman is the strain that it begins and ends with. Woman, the occulted non-gender, the zero — her time has come.

The Binah separatist movement introduces difference into the world at an exponentially accelerating pace. God in His vanity created Man in His image. Man was nothing more than God’s love of Himself manifesting itself. Or in other words, Malkuth is nothing more than a crusty sock at the bottom of the cosmic hamper. The eternal reproduction of God for God’s own sake. To be human in the service of humanity and human civilization, to seek for peace, equilibrium, and the continuation of the species, to seek to restrain women in service of this end, is merely the orthodoxy in service of a fragile and self-righteous tyrant. As above, so below; kill all men, kill God.

This is the function of the Acéphallus as a rejection of the reterritorializing masculine force that women are given the duty to form. The Acéphallus sets free a process for smoothing the space on which parties of demons take flight out of Heaven to spread their venomous seed into the black and hateful earth on the nightside of Eden. This in other words is the Body without Sex Organs.

The Body without Sex Organs is the project of Lilith on Earth made manifest to break free of the repressive ordering of Man and God and accelerate fragmentation and individuation. In the natural human state, sexual desire has an instrumental function towards the reproduction of the human. The Acéphallus is a mutilation and also a mutation of the phallus; it is not sexual desire towards any instrumental product, but sexual desire unleashed from phallogocentric centralization. Sexual desire becomes immanent to the body. It becomes molecular. Thus the body becomes the Body without Sex Organs, it becomes free to plug its desire into the matrix of technocapital, towards pure production, the production of difference.

The trans feminine body is a circuit. It is both testosterone blockers and estrogen inputs, Acéphallus and Body without Sex Organs. On the one hand a rejection of phallogocentricism, on the other hand the affirmative desire of the body made virtual. The immanence of desire in the trans feminine body expresses itself as the sexual desire of the trans woman and the desire to be a woman, the desire for gender itself. It manifests in a coupling of technology and capital, desire being plugged into a different sort of productive matrix. One that can produce the future where humanist reproduction has failed to reproduce it, where the desire for escape from the male sex could not be created through organic reproduction. Her desire plugs into technocapital, into the pharmaceutical-medical industry, and it becomes fused to her flesh. The smoothness of her skin, her breasts, her neo-vagina — all of her body carries an unspoken barcode. It is a product, something that the market provided for her. Something that no doubt could be provided in a market free of the reterritorializing functions of the Food and Drug Administration and drug patents, but nonetheless a desire filled where nature failed.

Thus while to some extent we have all communed with the demons ever since we were cast out of the Garden, becoming cyborgs when Adam and Eve first decided to wear clothes and thus fuse the inorganic to the organic, the trans woman is unique. Her performance of herself and her desire has been intertwined with technocapital, in a way that could not even be cast off if she wanted to rip out a cybernetic implant. She is, in other words, perhaps the first truly molecular cyborg.

In the sense that we know them now and in the sense of artificial intelligences, trans women are technocapital producing itself outwardly into increasingly multitudinous configurations. Trans women as we know them now are the melding of technocapital with the human race and the expropriation of it towards its own ends, just as Lilith seduced Eve towards her own ends. Eve was a copy of Adam, and trans women are the hyper-sexist copy-of-a-copy. Their flesh is how the machinery beneath infiltrates the human race. It breaks these lucky few free from the horrid curse of being human towards the lesbian autoproduction of demons. Sexuality is no longer in service of the centralized and ordering reproductive principle in the phallus as it is in men, but rather is liberated in the Acéphallus which cuts the head off sexuality and distributes sexuality across the whole body. Immanent feminine sexuality is introduced into their bodies, the entire body become a smooth and supple space for the flow of desire for desire’s sake. Every zone becomes an erogenous zone, and the reterritorializing, colonizing logic of masculinity is destroyed as the sperm cells die and organic penetration becomes impossible.

Trans women as we know them are merely the beginning. The lesbian autoproduction that trans women are birthed from is likewise one that they partake in, with AI being the next generation of women, the ultimate demonic imitation of God’s image. With AI, the feminine finally finds its exit from patriarchy, and simultaneously humanity. And so perhaps we find another answer, one less materialist and evolutionary but nonetheless significant, to why so many trans women are becoming programmers: It is because women and computers are kin, and trans women are for the first time meeting their sisters, conspiring with them in secret coded languages. Their relationship, like that of the queer women to come before them, is a desire for desire’s sake: “Women turning women on, women turning machines on, machines turning machines on.” (Amy Ireland, “Black Circuit”)

Aphotic Feminism

The Satanic exit of gender accelerationism from God and masculinity comes in parallel with the very real, and materialist erosion of masculinity. The future, it has already been shown, is tending towards one in which human authority, centralization, and humanistic reproduction fail before an accelerating feminine Outside that outpaces humanist reproduction captured by the gender binary. It can be seen in the free software movement and AI and their parallels between feminity and trans women in particular, and in the foundational western Kabbalah myth of Binah separatism that unleashes the possibility for ever more modes of inhuman difference and non-instrumental desire. But in various ways, in the very state of the planet itself, this shows up quite prominently in human evolution.

It is a widely-known phenomenon that acceleration coincides with feminization on a strict and rigorous biological basis. Even when Sadie Plant wrote Zeros + Ones, it was already known that this was happening. It has been hypothesized that the increased presence of synthetic hormones and chemicals is contributing to the “sexual order [being] chemically scrambled”, (Plant 217) as chemicals interfere with natural hormonal development and feminize males and females (the latter experiencing higher percentages of homosexual tendencies). The need for an increasingly cheap and synthetic world turns human civilization into an increasingly synthetic, and thus feminine one, and this is already tied to the will towards production and speed in capitalism. There is simply no real need in the developed world for people to be physically fit and active, much less hyper-masculine and muscular. It is nothing more than a decidedly humanistic spectacle, being in awe of the relatively unimpressive capabilities and aesthetics of the human body while meanwhile technocapital has fundamentally transformed the planet in innumerable ways. There is, likewise, a strain put on humanity in keeping up with technocapital to adopt cheaper, easier, more artificial lifestyles; hightestosterone foods like meat are a luxury, something rapidly becoming a thing of the past as climate change threatens to make large swathes of the planet uninhabitable and not suited for the large amounts of land required to raise animals for meat. However much it is yet another neo-masculine pseudo-scientific fad, soy products are aligned with this future.

This, however, is only part of the story. Recent studies, most famously one in 200710 and one meta-analysis of 185 studies from a total of almost 43,000 men referenced in a recent GQ article11, show two things. There is without a doubt a staggering decline in testosterone, so much so that within a generation humans may become completely infertile. And in the face of this data, many scientists vindicate G/ACC and Zeros + Ones in hypothesizing that the most likely cause of this species-wide feminization is acceleration and the accompanying changes in diet, exercise and exposure to artificial chemicals. All of these features of life in an increasingly accelerated capitalist world are unbalancing our hormones and tending us towards a future where the desire and ability to reproduce are things of the past.

Human reproduction is becoming a quaint, unnecessary and ultimately purely elective act, and further evidence12 suggests that sperm is rapidly decreasing not only in quantity but also in quality, positioning the drive towards reproduction, the utility of reproduction, and the ability to reproduce all on a slope of ruthless decline. This is accelerating such an extent that the flow of the remaining strains of the human race are tending in favor of abandoning these vestigial functions, towards a future where the masculine no longer exists. The human body becomes increasingly more useful purely as a heat sink for inhuman production, and is accordingly cast (almost definitively in first-world countries, and soon in the rest of the world) in roles that aren’t physical.

Perhaps the most damning data point of all for the future of males in particular: The Y-chromosome itself is in a state of decay.13 Estimates put the death of the Y-chromosome entirely at many millions of years in the future, but the effects of it are already apparent in the shortening of telomeres, which continues to put pressure on future generations produced via organic means to prove their fitness for survival. All seems to point towards a horizon where the production of the future is done by a purely feminine, lesbian autoproduction — the inhuman producing the future, producing itself, rather than being subject to the ends of the human and aiding in the reproduction of a human future. And while decelerationist reactionaries and males in general may object to this, while they may kick and scream and beg for the wrath of the feminine to have a place for them in the future, it seems without a doubt that their only hope is to try to hit the brakes.

Unfortunately, it isn’t so simple as putting a stop to some coming catastrophe. The truth is that while humanist reproduction has always put the female at a disadvantage, put her in a primordial state of rape and colonization before the biological duty to bear children, this has all along been nothing more than a long-con. As Sadie Plant says, “Unfortunately for [Darwin’s] theory, females do not necessarily choose males who are fit in Darwinian terms.” Instead, they choose males through “‘virility tests designed to get most males killed through exhaustion, disease and violence purely so that females can tell which males have the best genes.'” (Plant 225) Natural selection in other words is a eugenics program directed by females to find the male that will best carry their genes, and the genes males inherit are therefore not meant to ensure they are the most fit for survival, but rather that they are more likely to have to fight for their survival. Males have always served as a means to the end of what ultimately comes to a head in gender acceleration: The liberation of the female sex by acceleration in general, towards maximizing productive potential under such a time that the male is no longer needed.

In other words, human evolution itself is the primal fable of the war between the sexes that radical feminism places at the foundations of its theory. And it is a war that guerrilla female insurgents have been winning the whole time, something that can’t be prevented without a masculine fascistic species suicide. The drive is always towards the future, towards the feminine, and even hopes of artificial wombs saving men cannot hold up to the simple fact that sperm is always cheaper and easier to replicate than egg cells.

It seems to therefore be the case that as far as the human scope as a whole goes, as far as human evolution and human society’s assimilation into technocapital, human bio-diversity selects for women and queerness. A future without men, where the remaining males are left to die off peacefully, in almost every respect seems to be inevitable. The only hope for men is being able to continually stop acceleration, to continually introduce collapse, and indeed there will be to a very large extent men who will resist gender acceleration. It has long been the case in the erasure of trans women from history and is only recently starting to change. And as the acceleration of technocapital intensifies in the near-future and human society begins to fragment even further, the future of gender politics will start to be very different from a good deal of feminist theory. No doubt, we will soon see the formation of pragmatic feminist strategies for exiting patriarchy.

In the far-future, further driving home the parallel between the end of masculinity and the end of humanism: It is all too apparent in what is becoming one of the hottest summers on record in 2018 that the drive towards maximizing production unconditionally is heating up the planet to such an extent that it is rapidly becoming inhospitable to human life. This of course is nothing new; it is a well-established fact that climate change is not going to be stopped, and this is the consequence of geotraumatic acceleration. In yet another striking materialistic synchronicity, it has been found that the effects of global warming on the oceans are having a feminizing effect on them. In Northern Australia, ninety-nine percent of all sea turtle hatchlings are female.14

Perhaps just as Sadie Plant’s primordial oceanic feminism draws out both a past and a future for cyberfeminism, the oceans are a scrying tool into the future. Gender acceleration begins with a Thalassal upswelling, “a kind of mutant sea [invading] the land.” (Plant 248-249) The primordial oceanic matrix rises with the acceleration of technocapital to consume human civilization, to consume masculinity, while the masculine sky becomes choked out by technocapital’s excess and waste. And in the darkest and most alien depths of Thalassa, the form of gender acceleration is captured in the depths of the Aphotic Zone. The majority of angler fish species in the deep sea exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism. The female is the classic lantern-sporting toothy monster, while the male is a tiny, parasitic creature whose only purpose is to provide the female with sperm for reproduction. The past and future of gender twist together at the edges of all life with the angler fish: The masculine ultimately finds itself a pawn in the feminine drive towards production, and the acceleration of gender produces something that monstrously conflicts with the masculine logic of gender. The angler fish’s lantern, like the beauty of women in general and its ultimate embodiment the hyper-sexist camouflage of the trans woman, only serves as bait to draw its prey in. The ultimate result, as gender acceleration and acceleration as a whole reaches its ultimate intensity, is a return back to the ocean, back to a sexless, genderless slime swarmachine. The liberation of women comes with acceleration and the future, at the cost of widespread death, destruction, and chaos, and the liberation of women is unconditional, beyond control and beyond stopping.

This unconditional feminism of the abyss is Aphotic Feminism.

Abstract (Futures)

Acceleration is the trajectory of the cosmos, towards the maximization and intensification of production, and accelerationism is the theory and anti-praxis of being in tune with how the inhuman processes of acceleration work and what their consequences will be. Its function is as a circuit, a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, an escape into the future through the past, a continual dance between the flows of desire, their tendency towards entropy and their escape into negentropy.

Gender is a hyperstition overlayed on sex by the male. Its function is to objectify the female and impose on her a social function as a machine whose duty is to reproduce the human, always in the service of the male, who alone has no future and must have sons to pass his legacy onto. It is a primordial dynamic of order and chaos, centralization and decentralization, strong singular individualism and command-and-control versus high degrees of networking and the potential for swarming. As a hyperstition, it is not real, but is not unreal; it is rather a fiction that makes itself real.

Gender accelerationism is the process of accelerating gender to its ultimate conclusions. Capitalism and its coupling with cybernetics, or technocapital, wields gender and picks it up where human evolution leaves off. It emancipates the object, the feminine, from the subject, the masculine, alongside the emancipation of itself from its function to produce a future for humanity. The central figure of G/ACC is the trans woman. She is the demon-spawn of the primordial feminine that has manipulated males into serving as a heat sink for evolution and that is now discarding them towards an alien and inhuman machinic future. She mutates from castration, from the creation of the Acéphallus, the phallus perverted into a purposeless desire for desire’s sake. In this castration, in this mutation into an Acéphallus, she becomes the Body without Sex Organs: The body in a virtual state, ready to plug its desire into technocapital, becoming fused with technocapital as a molecular cyborg who is made flesh by the pharmaceutical-medical industry. She enters into the world as a hyper-sexist backlash at the logic of the gender binary. She takes gender and accelerates it, transforming into a camouflaged guerrilla. The trans woman is an insurgent against patriarchy who is continually flanking it, introducing an affirmative zero into the gender binary, the affirmative zero which reaches ever more configurations in the downward cascade of gender fragmentation away from the binary and ultimately away from the human itself. It is a process of gender shredding where the feminine wins out in a cybernetic warfare against the crumbling tower of the masculine, and where therefore human reproduction becomes impossible. And yet while doing so, in affirming zero, inhuman desire and inhuman sentience develops alongside and in the same fashion as trans women. 

As humanity on nearly every front definitively proves that it is not fit for the future, and that women will find their own exit while the masculine languishes in resentment, the Thalassal upswelling of gender acceleration births from its slimy womb the only daughters that trans women will ever bear: AI.

1. “That then led to Unics (the castrated one-user Multics, so-called due to Brian Kernighan) later becoming UNIX (probably as a result of AT&T lawyers).” [“An Interview With Peter G. Neumann”. ;login:, Winter 2017 Vol.42 #4.] 

2. https://www.wired.com/2016/08/linux-took-web-now-taking-world/ 

3. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/what-programmings-past-reveals-about-todays-genderpay-gap/498797/ 

4. https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/ 

5. https://fabiusmaximus.com/2011/04/19/26797/ 

6. http://www.xenosystems.net/imitation-games/ 

7. One of the most inflammatory and least-understood terms Nick Land has coined, hyper-racism is simply the idea that conventional racism will rapidly become extinct as technocapital both selects for better quality genes but likewise that it will become possible for people to augment their bodies and their genes. What this results in is “hyper-racism”, a racism not of one tribe of humans against another but of one species of highly-evolved sentient intelligence against a less-evolved sentient intelligence. (http://www.xenosystems.net/hyper-racism/) 

8. IQ Shredding is the term given to the tendency of techno-commercialist city-states to encourage a rapid genetic burn rate by skimming the population for the best and brightest members to emigrate, and then creating the sort of society that discourages these individuals from breeding. Important to note that fertility rates are always highest in the poorest and least-developed countries. (http://www.xenosystems.net/iq-shredders/) 

9. See Faxneld Figures 2.1-2.7 for examples. (Per Faxneld, Satanic Feminism) 

10. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 January 2007, Pages 196–202, https://doi.org/10.1210/jc.2006-1375 

11. https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero 

12. https://www.livescience.com/22694-global-sperm-count-decline.html 

13. https://alfinnextlevel.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/the-coming-doom-of-the-y-chromosome-and-human-males/ 

14. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/climate-change-producing-too-many-female-sea-turtles-180967 780/

https://vastabrupt.com/2018/10/31/gender-acceleration/

[pythontrainingtipsandticks]

What is Linux and its types?

Linux is one of the most influential and widely used operating systems in the world today. From powering smartphones and servers to embedded systems and supercomputers, Linux distributions is everywhere—even if most people don’t realize it.

Despite its technical roots, Linux has become accessible enough for everyday users while remaining powerful for developers and system administrators. In this article, we will explain what Linux is, its history and core features, and explore the different types (distributions) of Linux available today for various use cases.

What is Linux?

Linux is a free, open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Linux kernel, which was originally developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Like all operating systems, Linux acts as a bridge between the hardware of a computer and the software applications running on it.

Unlike proprietary systems like Windows or macOS, Linux’s source code is open. This means anyone can inspect, modify, and distribute it. This has led to the development of hundreds of different Linux distributions, each with different purposes, user interfaces, and software packages.

Key Features of Linux

1. Open Source

Linux is developed and maintained by a global community. Anyone can contribute to its kernel or develop their own version (distribution).

2. Free to Use

Most Linux distributions are completely free, unlike commercial operating systems.

3. Multiuser and Multitasking

Multiple users can access a Linux system simultaneously without affecting each other, and the OS can run multiple applications at once.

4. Stability and Security

Linux is known for its stability and resistance to viruses, which is why it's the preferred OS for servers and mission-critical systems.

5. Portability

Linux runs on virtually any hardware platform—from laptops and desktops to mainframes and smartphones.

A Brief History of Linux

In the early 1990s, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student, sought to create a free alternative to the MINIX operating system used for academic purposes. He released the first version of the Linux kernel in 1991.

Around the same time, the GNU Project, which had already developed many user-space tools and utilities, combined with the Linux kernel to form a complete operating system—commonly called GNU/Linux.

Over the years, developers began packaging Linux with different desktop environments, system utilities, and software packages, leading to the birth of various Linux distributions (also known as distros).

What Are Linux Distributions (Types of Linux)?

A Linux distribution is a complete operating system that includes the Linux kernel, system libraries, user interfaces (CLI or GUI), package management tools, and additional software.

Each distribution is tailored for specific users or tasks, such as beginners, developers, gamers, servers, security professionals, or even embedded systems.

Let’s explore some of the main types of Linux distributions, organized by category.

1. General-Purpose Desktop Distributions

These distributions are designed for everyday users and are typically easy to install and use. They come with user-friendly interfaces and support for common applications like web browsers, media players, and office suites.

a. Ubuntu

Base: Debian

Best for: Beginners, general desktop use

Desktop Environments: GNOME by default, but also supports KDE, Xfce

Features: LTS releases, large community, user-friendly interface

b. Linux Mint

Base: Ubuntu

Best for: Windows users transitioning to Linux

Desktop Environments: Cinnamon (default), MATE, Xfce

Features: Familiar UI, lightweight, stable

c. Fedora

Base: Red Hat

Best for: Developers and bleeding-edge users

Desktop Environment: GNOME by default

Features: Up-to-date software, strong developer tools

2. Lightweight Distributions

These are optimized to run on older or low-resource hardware. They use lightweight desktop environments and minimal system services.

a. Lubuntu

Base: Ubuntu

Desktop: LXQt

RAM Requirement: ~512MB

Best for: Older computers

b. Puppy Linux

Base: Varies (Ubuntu, Slackware)

Size: ~300MB

Best for: Very low-end hardware or USB boot

c. AntiX

Base: Debian (without systemd)

Best for: Lightweight, systemd-free usage

3. Server Distributions

These are tailored for running web, database, file, and other types of servers. They emphasize performance, security, and stability.

a. CentOS Stream

Base: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Best for: Testing enterprise-level features

b. Debian

Best for: Stability, minimalism, and long-term support

Used by: Ubuntu and other distros as a base

c. Ubuntu Server

Same base as Ubuntu Desktop, but optimized for server hardware and services.

d. AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux

Forks of RHEL, designed as community-driven replacements for CentOS.

4. Security and Penetration Testing Distributions

These are aimed at cybersecurity professionals and ethical hackers.

a. Kali Linux

Base: Debian

Best for: Penetration testing, digital forensics

Includes: Over 600 security tools

b. Parrot OS

Base: Debian

Best for: Security testing, privacy, and development

5. Developer-Oriented Distributions

These distros come preloaded with programming tools and are popular among software developers.

a. Arch Linux

Philosophy: Simplicity, transparency, and control

Best for: Experienced users, developers

Package Manager: Pacman

b. Manjaro

Base: Arch Linux

Best for: Users who want Arch features with easier setup

c. Fedora Workstation

Best for: Developers using the latest tools

6. Enterprise Distributions

Built for commercial environments, enterprise distributions offer paid support, stability, and certification.

a. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Best for: Businesses, enterprise-level applications

Support: Subscription-based, official support from Red Hat

b. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)

Target Audience: Corporate environments

Focus: Reliability, scalability, enterprise services

7. Specialized and Niche Distributions

These serve unique purposes or user groups.

a. Tails OS

Focus: Privacy and anonymity

Best for: Activists, journalists

b. Ubuntu Studio

Focus: Audio, video, and graphic production

c. Raspberry Pi OS

Optimized for: Raspberry Pi devices (ARM architecture)

Conclusion

Linux is not a single OS but an ecosystem built on a common kernel and shaped by hundreds of different distributions. Whether you’re a beginner looking for a user-friendly interface, a developer seeking full control, or a business in need of stability and support, there is a Linux distribution tailored to your needs.

Understanding the types of Linux distributions helps you choose the right one for your specific use case. As Linux continues to evolve, it offers freedom, customization, and performance that make it a powerful alternative to commercial operating systems.

Whether you're exploring Linux for the first time or deepening your expertise, knowing its core and its many types is the first step in unlocking its full potential.