What you guys are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux. Thank you for taking your time to cooperate with with me, your friendly GNU+Linux neighbor, Richard Stallman.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Stallman, begging to be defenestrated.

All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

That’s not even true, because they don’t all have a GNU userland.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 2 weeks ago

For example Alpine Linux. Or Android.

[–] federalreverse@feddit.org 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It used to be true. Stallman didn't anticipate the GPL hate coming from big corporates like cloud providers. Literally the major reason why Alpine and Android are the way they are.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That’s at least partially true, perhaps even predominantly, but there’s also the desire to have very lean distributions for containterization, and GNU is comparatively “bloated,” for lack of a better term.

[–] federalreverse@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago

So for Android, the story is that Google really wanted to be able to keep the userland private whenever that fit their corporate agenda. Granted, they did take the time to modernize things and slim things down for mobile devices.

As to the containerization thing: I don't completely buy the bloat argument when it comes from the same kinds of people that think it's a good idea to split applications into a million microservices, each running in their own container. What I do buy is managers worrying whether they need to release their super-secret proprietary code because they included a GPL'd component. Business distros are afraid include e.g. Ghostscript these days because Google T&C say they don't want any AGPL software running in their cloud. I also know that engineers on regular distros have spent time trimming dependencies down to match Alpine, so you can get regular distros almost as small as Alpine images.

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