In 2025, the most prevalent use case for Linux, is running containers with a plethora of different applications. There’s all kinds of standard containers available like web servers (apache en nginx), database servers (mysql, postgresql), messaging servers (rabbitmq), and more, which are all used as building blocks to build other application stacks.

The big question is if you want to build your own applications in house or not. More and more external suppliers deliver specific line-of-business applications as a container stack, where they expect their clients to have the skills and knowledge to run these containers on their own infrastructure.

If you are going to build your own applications or scripts to automate existing or new business processes, nowadays the trend is to do that with the ‘cloud native’ philosophy, which means building platform-agnostic containers, along with the best practices that go with that mindset. You will want supporting applications like Gitlab, to be used as your internal code repository and version control system. When you check in your code, using CI/CD pipelines, new containers are built automatically and pushed to a container registry like Harbor. Other application servers, either production or test, will automatically pick up these new container images and deploy them in the right envorinment. This is the way applications are developed in 2025. Whatever programming language you use is not that relevant, as long as your container runs on your computer, it will run the same in test and production.

Even without containers, there’s a lot of applications that run on Linux. The most used of all is probably the web server. Probably around 98% of all webservers worldwide run Linux, with software like Apache or Nginx. These web servers are usually used in conjunction with database servers like MySQL or Postgres, and PHP as scripting engine to host dynamic websites. Most websites are hosted this way. A large number of web applications are also build using Django (Python) and even Microsoft .NET, which runs fine on linux, although usually deployed as containers.

Here’s another few examples of well known applications in the Linux ecosystem:

Checkmk: a monitoring application. The ‘raw’ version suffices for almost all companies. This allows you to monitor internal and external systems, whether it’s Linux, Windows or something else, using an agent, using SNMP or using API’s: you can see if disks are filling up, which services are stopped, which certificates are about to expire, if your web server is fast enough, if a mail flow is working correctly, of scheduled tasks are running correctly, if temperatures are between certain thresholds, if you RAID-controller is reporting a health status, etc. If you can see it you can monitor it, and if necessary send alerts.

Grafana: a dashboard application. Everything you can measure, you can plot in graphs or counters. And we’re not just talking about IT-related metrics like disk usage or CPU usage, but especially the business side is interesting. Write scripts and graphs to show how your key performance indicators are doing, how many products are you selling, what is the capacity or your warehouse, how much overtime is logged, if you can think of it, you can turn it into a dashboard.

Netbox: een IPAM/DCIM tool (IP-address administration tool en datacenter infrastructure managementsystem). Document all your network sites, rooms, racks and servers, all of your IP space, circuits to providers, every cable in your network and whether it’s CAT5 of CAT6, single-mode fiber or multi-mode, what color, what length, etc. An ideal tool to document your network.

Wekan: een well-known Kanban board, a way to implement Scrum/Agile method: make boards with swimlanes and lists, and add cards, assign people, assign labels, and move the cards around to manage project progress.

Graylog: the best known open source log servers. Send all logs to Graylog using syslog, filebeat or other protocols, transform the logs, write pipelines to interpret the logs, and graylog will store everything in it’s blazing fast Elasticsearch backend. You can search instantly through vast amounts of data. The perfect solution for a quick and easy central log server, or for a SIEM on a budget.