“Hey, man, is that GNU/Linux on your computer?”, “Yes.”, “Great, but I use Microsoft Windows.” You get the idea. A “heavy” academic exchange like that would sound comical, to say the least. And that’s exactly the point of this article. One of the long-running debates in the Linux ecosystem: whether the system should be called GNU/Linux or simply Linux.
First, let’s start with the dry technical facts, which you’ve probably heard a hundred times already, but they’re still worth mentioning here. Strictly speaking, Linux refers only to a single component of the operating system, namely the kernel written by Linus Torvalds. That’s it. It’s no coincidence that, if you’ve noticed, most distributions name their kernel packages accordingly, following conventions like linux-6.18.2.x64.
Does anyone actually care?
RMS
Interject me, daddy
Must be a slow news day.
And thank god for that!
Everyone knows it’s win32/Linux.
GNUcrosoft Lindows
This is cursed but I like it.
There is no operating system with either name. The operating systems are called Debian, Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.
We need a name to collectively refer to them. If we say “Linux” because they share the Linux kernel, ok, but so does eg. Android.
What better name is there to refer to the ones in the above list, but not Android, than “GNU/Linux”?
POSIX would make more sense as its the collection of standards as that would encompass BSDs as well. Since you can run Linux compatible software with neither GNU utils nor Linux.
The better name would be Linux/systemd/Wayland/KDE.
@Limerance @schnurrito Well, Linux\systemd\Wayland\KDE if that’s your salt; Linux\Guix\AwesomeWM for me!
How about linux.
I like to keep things simple
How about lin.
That might have been an apt name at first, but the UX has come along way since the early days.
So what would you name the category that includes Alpine Linux and Chimera Linux, as was brought up in the article?
If I recall correctly, Ubuntu switched to rust core utils, so it’s no more GNU/Linux but just… Linux.
still uses glibc right? I think the big thing about alpine is that it uses musl as its libc
You have to use the full name.
“I use GNU is not Unix slash Linux.”
It makes people think GNU is neither Unix nor Linux.
It would have helped a lot if GNU weren’t such a weird acronym whose pronunciation is not at all obvious.
It’s pronounced just like gif, right?
Yes, exactly, which as we all know stands for GIF Image Format.
