For any readers of my blog totally unfamiliar with Linux, let me give you a really quick primer. Linux is an operating system (OS), like Windows or macOS. The OS is what tells your computer how to “operate”—draw windows, handle files, launch programs, all that good stuff. You may never have run across anyone using Linux, because only about 5% of home computers run Linux. But in the networking/cloud computing space, the percentage of machines and virtual machines running Linux is as high as 96% of web servers.