Comparing windows and Linux hardware management.

An operating systems most basic function is to act as a layer between the computer hardware and the user space programs. User space meaning the programs you use as a computer user, ie. office, email, internet and games programs. What an operating system provides to those user space programs is a standard interface to the computers hardware, no matter what type of hardware that is.

For example, to see all those pretty pictures on the screen in front of you the program you are currently using must send that data to the graphics card, which is then displayed on the screen. Yet there are umpteen thousands of different makes and models of graphic cards. In the days before proper operating systems each program had to interact directly with the hardware. This means that if you change the hardware you needed to change the program to match.

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