An operating system is an application just like any other applications we use on our computers. what makes an operating system special? what does it do differently?

An operating system(OS) is an interface between the hardware and the user. An OS is built so that it could support other software. OS is a system software which is used to support other application softwares.

Explanation:

An operating system handles all the hardware of the system and allows users access to those hardware components with the help of application softwares.

An OS consist of many libraries and APIs which allows programmers to write and execute codes. There are many types of OS such as real time, multitasking, multi programming OS.

The OS is responsible for allocating memory, managing the hardware, distributing resources across different processors in an distributed system.

So all these features makes them different from application software. The OS is responsible allocating memory and hardware resources to these softwares.