To clarify a bit, you don’t need additional things to run your executables per se (for example, pure Go binaries can run directly on the Linux kernel) but there

To clarify a bit, you don’t need additional things to run your executables per se (for example, pure Go binaries can run directly on the Linux kernel) but there are a lot of utilities that you will probably want—things like a process manager, SSH daemon, a shell, etc. These are all userland components.