• lad
    4•20 days ago

    To be fair, I’m using Linux, MacOS with Darwin Nix for managing it, Windows, and I still am not sure what exactly is an operating system, what’s the role of kernel and all of the possible system software is. Well, I think kernel is for hardware abstraction, but other than that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • @Lightfire228@pawb.social
      6•20 days ago

      The kernel does stuff like

      • process and CPU task management
      • hardware abstraction
      • memory management (at the process level),
      • file system managment
      • and resource isolation (such as randomized memory addresses (ASLR))

      The rest of the OS provides the actual software that users interact with, like

      • file managers
      • desktop rendering and window management
      • settings menus
      • sound mixing between applications
      • graphics rendering