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I understand that it’s partly about abstraction, but since I’m a beginner, these concepts are very murky to me. Is Mac OS built on top of Linux architecture? How does Linux relate to Unix/Ubuntu? I’ve tried researching this elsewhere, but hard to find a very clear explanation.
Unix is an operating system originally developed in the 1970s, on which Mac OS X is based. Linux is a kernel (the part of an operating system which interfaces with the hardware), while distributions such as Ubuntu or Fedora add the rest of the software (much of which comes from the GNU project) to make it into a full OS. Linux and the GNU project originally came to exist to provide a free alternative to the closed-source Unix, so while the code is not descended from Unix, they are quite similar.