Comment by Fice | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fice | Hacker News Reader

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I usually refer to distributions like Debian or Fedora as GNU/Linux to distinguish them from other systems that use Linux kernel (e.g. Android). GNU defines the runtime environment, and by knowing that a system is GNU, we understand what software it is supposed to run. The kernel is mostly relevant for hardware support, the runtime defines software compatibility.

If we look deeper, we see that GNU/Linux is a C system, and I'd argue that this is the most essential characteristic ("An operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit inside a language; there shouldn’t be one” — Dan Ingalls, Design Principles Behind Smalltalk). Of course, GNU system supports many programming languages, but they all use C to interface with the system. Get familiar with non-C systems like Smalltalk or Oberon to see how programming language is essential. Also web browsers grew to become operating systems of their own (running on top of C systems for now) — the JavaScript systems.

Other users have touched on the fact that GNU makes up a very small part of the current user-land ecosystem. It seems to me that the only reason to keep GNU in the GNU/Linux title is for historical purposes, but even then I wouldn't argue for that. Why is GNU worthy of being included when referring to a Linux system in 2020? Linux, as I know it, seems to be pretty distinct from what it was before my time.

I use Gnome every single day. It's a pretty substantial part of the user experience.

I don’t - and yet I work on the same OS, writing the same code and scripts using the same tools (clang, bazel, python).

Gnome is not a defining part of a modern linux system, it is just one choice of many DEs. And a large fraction of Linux systems don’t run any DE at all.

All the servers I interact with on a daily basis are certainly not running Gnome. So desktops running the Linux kernel are GNU\Linux but servers running the Linux kernel are just...Linux?

That's funny, I have a machine over here that's running Debian with musl and busybox.

I think people are way too worried about who gets credit. If rms wanted the recognition that bad, he should have finished Hurd. Also, who started say XFree86 or X.org? I have no idea. But their software is probably a lot more important to a lot of users than gcc or even glibc is.

My comment was not about giving credit. The point is that if you know that the system is GNU, you know what software it is supposed to run, and that does not mean that it can not be compatible if it is not GNU. We can probably also use POSIX (btw, the name for the standard was suggested by RMS [1]) as the lowest common denominator, but would that also include Android?

[1] https://stallman.org/articles/posix.html

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