Linux

"I use Linux as my operating system," I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually", he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!' I don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. It's Linux, but it's not GNU+Linux.

The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" Coolly, I reply "If windows was compiled With gcc, would that make it GNU?" I interrupt his response with "-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even you were correct, you wont be for long."

With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death.

Also, Unix ≠ Linux.

given Android, it might even be that most linuxes aren't GNU/linux

When Android came out, it really hit this and the limits of the GPLvII home for me

And not all GNU is Linux! Beyond the world famous GNU Hurd, there's also Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and Nexenta (GNU/Illumos, which is the OpenSolaris kernel).

I think the most esoteric of them, though, is GNU Darwin (GNU/XNU). Darwin is the open source parts of OS X, including its kernel, XNU. There used to be an OpenDarwin project to try to turn Darwin into an actual independent operating system, but they failed, and were superseded by PureDarwin, which took a harder line against anything OS X getting into the system. GNU Darwin took it one step further and removed just about all of Darwin (except XNU) and replaced it with GNU instead.

Android is exactly why I think it's important not to ditch GNU in GNU/Linux. I don't care about codelines, I care about the philosophy.

• Chimera (alpha stage): Chimera uses a novel combination of core tools from FreeBSD, the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library

Who was the incredible smart person to name a new distro with a similar name to another, older, Linus distro? ChimeraOS

Yes, officer. This blasphemer right here.

The fsf website actually separates distros. There is GNU/Linux and nonGNU/linux

nobody is saying that linux distros that don't have the gnu core utils needs to be called GNU/Linux

Its nonGNU/linux

I would argue that Android has very little to do with Linux. You don't even have to go far into the quirks of the userland, the kernel is a heavily modified flavor of it to which the linux documentation simply does not apply, or not really accurately.

With recent versions it might be better now, but holy guacamole it is very bad in those before that, basically it's filled with nonstandard modifications (well, probably depends on what you call standard, though..)

Blasphemy!

/s

Alpine's great, it's my go-to lightweight/server distro, just really wish they had an option for glibc, musl is just way too limiting for a daily driver...

The GNU project gave birth to and spread the idea of free software worldwide. Would they not have started with the GNU operating system (they wrote a LOT of code) and doing activism then free software would surely not exist in the magnitude it does today.

The Linux kernel would not be this mainstream at all. Spiritually, this makes every popular free OS a GNU system. Even BSD was only freed because Stallman explicitly requested it. Credit where credit is due.

For people who still don't grasp the difference:

GNU/Linux - for example debian

Linux - for example kernel (android)

I take GNU Linux to be GNU-flavoured Linux. Musl and Busybox still behave like GNU, since they were written as alternatives to GNU (at least busybox). Alpine belongs in the same category as regular Linux distros - unlike Android.

More important than this distinction though, is the philosophy behind them. Despite the difference in license, Musl and Busybox still value freedom, like GNU. Android is a monstrosity - a wolf in sheep's clothing. A malware masquerading as open source.

But if the GNU Project created an OS based on SerenityOS, would it be GNU/Serenity? 🤔