Operating Systems
An operating system is the program that after being initially loaded into the computer by a boot program, manages all the other programs in a computer.
Most of today's desktop computers have one of the three major operating systems available. In order of usage share, they are Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Microsoft Windows and Linux can be used for almost any desktop computer, although Mac OS X can be used on some computers that are not Apple branded, the legality of this is currently disputed. Mac OS has been designed by Apple to only work on Apple computers unless you have an EFI emulator which creates an environment that can boot Mac OS X on a regular PC. New versions of each of these operating systems are released on a semi-regular basis. The newest version of Microsoft Windows is called Windows 8 which is radically different to the previous OS of Windows. The newest version of Mac OS is OS X Mountain Lion. Linux is available in multiple distributions, the more popular being Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE. Each distribution has its own version number and bundled software, but all distributions of Linux contain a Linux kernel.
Read more about this topic: Desktop Computer
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