What is the difference between UNIX and Linux?

[TapEngine]

What is the difference between UNIX and Linux?

[shone]

 Linux is an operating system kernel, and UNIX is a certification for operating systems. The UNIX standard evolved from the original Unix system developed at Bell Labs. After Unix System V, it ceased to be developed as a single operating system, and was instead developed by various competing companies, such as Solaris (from Sun Microsystems), AIX (from IBM), HP-UX (from Hewlett-Packard), and IRIX (from Silicon Graphics). UNIX is a specification for baseline interoperability between these systems, even though there are many major architectural differences between them.
 Linux has never been certified as being a version of UNIX, so it is described as being "Unix-like."
 A comprehensive list of differences between Linux and "UNIX" isn't possible, because there are several completely different "UNIX" systems.

[WHUK]

Linux is nothing more than a kernel.
An operating system is a piece of software that controls all of the hardware resources on your computer or laptop. Simply defined, the operating system is in charge of coordinating the connection between your program and your hardware. Unix is a comprehensive set of operating systems without the operating system.
Bell Labs produced the first UNIX operating system in 1973. It was one of the first multi-user multi-tasking computer operating systems, and it grew in popularity among academics.

[Akshay_M]

There are not much differences between Linux and UNIX in terms of most of the commands and working if looking from an end-user perspective. But internally in the sense of hardware, kernel, patches etc there are so many differences. Linux is considered as Unix-Like Operating system coming under the category of UNIX clones.

#UNIX was developed and evolved more as a licensed version. It was used more for commercial purpose. This was one of the reason for Linux to be developed as a free operating system by Linus Torvalds. Once the Linux kernel was developed later it was released under GPL (GNU General Public License) integrated with libraries, compilers, text editors transforming it into an operating system and releasing worldwide as opensource.

#Linux can be much more flexible as compared to Unix as they can be installed on almost any hardware. But Unix OS are very restricted when it comes for the supported hardware.

#Linux has very high scalibility be it in terms of hardware architectures or filesystem as it suports many of them unlike UNIX OS which supports very few type of filesystem.

#UNIX Operating System Names

A few popular names:

HP-UX
IBM AIX
Sun Solairs
Mac OS X
IRIX
#Linux Distribution (Operating System) Names

A few popular names:

Redhat Enterprise Linux
Fedora Linux
Debian Linux
Suse Enterprise Linux
Ubuntu Linux
#Common Things Between Linux & UNIX

Both share many common applications such as:

GUI, file, and windows managers (KDE, Gnome)
Shells (ksh, csh, bash)
Various office applications such as Apache OpenOffice
Development tools (perl, php, python, GNU c/c++ compilers)
Posix interface