This category and its subcategories deal with operating systems, the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations, as well as running application software such as word processing programs and Web browsers.

Pages in this category should be moved to subcategories where applicable. This category may require frequent maintenance to avoid becoming too large. It should directly contain very few, if any, pages and should mainly contain subcategories.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Operating systems.

An article about operating systems should be categorized with all the subcategories appropriate to that article. Only when there are no appropriate subcategories should an article be categorized in the category Operating systems (see Wikipedia:Categorization and subcategories for an explanation).

Articles about operating system concepts and components can be found in Category:Operating system technology.