Comment by red_admiral | Hacker News Reader

Comment by red_admiral | Hacker News Reader

Several red flags here.

First, I have to fill in a form and confirm an e-mail subscription before I can download the PDF. For reference, the real download link is https://flaviocopes.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/linux-comman...

Secondly, "No one can dictate which apps you can run, or “call home” with apps that track you, your position, and more."

Everything from ubuntu's amazon lens integration to android to firefox' pocket integration comes to mind. Yes, technically you can rebuild all these things from source and strip out the parts you don't like - don't like google tracking you? Chromium is open source, just edit the tracking out and build your own!

Practically speaking just about no-one can manage that. You have to either live with what you're offered or go to a lot of effort and practically have a degree in CS or equivalent. The author here has a very simplistic view of the world.

This sounds like a moderate-at-best quality article written to farm newsletter subscriptions. Could be better.

> Linux is an operating system, like macOS or Windows.

Nup, it's just a kernel.

I'd just like to interject for moment. What you're refering 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!

(https://www.lurkmore.com/view/GNU/Linux_interjection)

> All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!

s/All/Most

Alpine Linux uses musl libc and busybox, for example.

Thank you for the excellent explanation! I have always referred to Linux as an operating system and I will be more careful with that nuance. I was one of today's 10,000 [0].

[0] https://xkcd.com/1053/ (Ten Thousand)

You're being trolled. The comment you replied to is a copy paste of an oft-mocked post made by Richard Stallman. People post it in Linux threads to make fun of his pedantry and his perceived bitterness over Linux becoming the dominant kernel over GNU Hurd

Apologies for the late response, but thank you for letting me know!

This just isn’t really true from a linguistic point of view any more.

Most people use Linux to mean one of many full operating system distributions, and then refer to the kernel as ‘the Linux kernel’. Gnu gets referred to in relation to the many tools. That’s just how the language has worked out.

The comment is certainly true in terms of who contributed various components, although many distributions do increasingly contain critical components that have nothing to do with GNU.

You're being trolled. The comment you replied to is a copy paste of an oft-mocked post made by Richard Stallman. People post it in Linux threads to make fun of his pedantry and his perceived bitterness over Linux becoming the dominant kernel over GNU Hurd.

Troll successful!

I knew it was Stallman’s bitterness. I just didn’t know it was a copy/paste!

icecat has all the tracking stuff from Firefox removed. If you're willing to put up with the "purists" from eg the FSF you get a lot of benefits like not having your software track you or do things you don't like because the dark pattern works with some sales funnel etc.

It's not that hard in Arch Linux. You get the PKGBUILD for original package, and run makepkg once with an option to just prepare the src/, then you can modify it and then you run makepkg with a flag to skip the src/ preparation and finish the build.

Just to change the build/configure flags, you can simply edit the PKGBUILD.

Nothing fancy, I've been building firefox this way to disable signing requirements for extensions, until I gave up on firefox extensions completely, because of the general unfriendliness to developers with the signing requirements that can't be disabled without wasting a shitton of electricity.

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