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“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.
I have read this a hundred times and it’s still as beautiful as the day I first read it.
First time for me — I look forward to finding it again someday
Beautiful
Also, Unix ≠ Linux.
It’s only called UNIX if it comes from the Santa Cruz region of California, otherwise it’s a sparkling POSIX.
Technically, no, indeed. On paper, most (outside UNIX purists) refer to it (and MINIX) as Unix-like, as they don’t share much from UNIX outside the underlying philosophy. Ritchie himself still thought of Linux as mostly Unix in essence. Same kind of Ayckchyually, basically lol
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Linux is not Unix
That’s what i said.
Let me rephrase :-)
Linux Is Not UniX
🙃
No, you said Linux is not equal to Unix, which is also technically correct.
No, he said Unix is not equal to Linux. xD
nobody is saying that linux distros that don’t have the gnu core utils needs to be called GNU/Linux
And nobody is saying that they do. But there are plenty of people who are unaware that non-GNU Linuxes exist.
But there are plenty of people who are unaware that
non-GNULinuxesexist.Also true. Feel free to make an informational post on the matter.
And plenty who don’t know you can GNU without Linux.
After 33 years of development, GNU/Hurd still may not be ready for production use, but it’s not quite dead 💀 🦜
So there’s still hope for StarCitizen.
Yes, officer. This blasphemer right here.
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
Blasphemy!
/s
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.
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…)
android works on upstream kernel fine. in fact, you can even run a linux chroot inside of a booted android perfectly fine. android, especially newer ones, really arent that far off normal linux at all anymore, hell Waydroid is literally running android inside of an LXC container with some patches to get proper integration with the host working
Honestly when I first read that I just assumed that ChimeraOS decided to go in an new direction. Also it’s not like ChimeraOS is some small super niche distro it seems relatively popular.
Also, on their main page:
Chimera aims to eliminate legacy cruft where possible to deliver a modern, general purpose, fully featured operating system that is simple but complete.
While on their Community page:
Our primary means of communication is IRC. […] We ask you to refrain from using advanced Matrix features, such as reactions, editing, message removal, markup and multi-line messages while using the chat. This is because users on IRC side will either not see that or it will clutter the channel. Stick to simple, plain text messages, like you would if you were on IRC.
Do you think they’re aware of the irony of relying on crusty old IRC while touting about Linux having legacy cruft and their code being better?
@entropicdrift would you mind elaborating how the choice of a chat protocol is connected to technical aspects of an operating system? i feel like i’m not galaxy brain enough for that
It’s just an ironic contradiction of philosophy.
Over on the OS side they’re dedicated to making a fresh start and leaving behind crufty old standards, but on their chat server they’ve limited their chat tech to the capabilities of IRC, a chat protocol so old it pre-dates Linux.
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.
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Arguably yes, but none of that is a good reason to put GNU in the name. I don’t think even Stallman argued that Linux distributions should use the name GNU to give credit to GNU’s influence.
The reason always given is a different one: it’s because distros traditionally took a lot of code from the GNU project, which is a different matter. That reasoning does make some kind of sense, even though I don’t fully agree.
Aaaand Redox. Which is not Linux, but may some time in some Future replace it.
🤞 I’d rather chew glass than deal with C again.
I really think the existing maintainers need to strengthen this. A microkernel sounds like a very good concept, and new college graduates often dont know C or even C++ anymore. Me included, if I would learn a low level language I see no purpose for anything but Rust
It’s unfortunate that Go has become so popular at the expense of modern system programming languages like Rust and Nim and Zig. Go is such a platypus: a compiled language that isn’t a proper system language.
For people who still don’t grasp the difference:
GNU/Linux - for example debian
Linux - for example kernel (android)
