Background services are essential on every computer operating system. On Windows if you pull up Task Manager you can find a list running at any given time handling various tasks invisibly. You can see a list of background tasks on my PC below. For the most part, pretty standard stuff aside from GOG Galaxy. I like old computer games, sue me.
Anyway, on Linux these services are known as “Daemons,” which I believe is meant to be a combination of “Demon” and “Damon”. I believe the inclusion of the actor is due to the fact Linux uses the Bourne Again Shell, and Matt Damon was Jason Bourne. Just like their Windows counterpart most people will never need to know about them. It’s probably still nice to know what’s going on under the hood though, just in case. So, Daemons come in two types: independent or child as an independent process. The reason is that as tasks are executed the expectations and requirements may change. For example, on the server side a parent may spawn a child daemon assigned to a specified port to listen to requests.
Daemons are only unique from normal processes because they are automatic. In general, you should probably leave background processes alone. However, you can sometimes restart explorer.exe instead of your computer on Windows. This trick will not work for massive updates that will change your entire system, but if you block a site with your hosts file you can use this trick to enable those changes. Sometimes what the system is really asking for is to restart a process or Daemon when it wants a system restart, and usually it’ll just be easier to comply.
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