“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
brought tears to my eyes
Also, Unix ≠ Linux.
It’s only called UNIX if it comes from the Santa Cruz region of California, otherwise it’s a sparkling POSIX.
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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
I can see the value of this. Linux \not \in Unix, and also Linux \not = Unix.
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
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.
Android is exactly why I think it’s important not to ditch GNU in GNU/Linux. I don’t care about codelines, I care about the philosophy.
Philosophy probably did play a significant role: Google could have chosen BusyBox, which is GPL licensed, if their concern was solely the GNU user space’s comparative bloat.
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.
@GameWarrior maybe they should’ve checked better before picking an already-used name, because Chimera Linux was using it first: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-about-chimeraos
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.
IRC is perfect, that is why it no longer evolves.
@entropicdrift considering how universal IRC is for open source and how other solutions are persistently lacking for the purpose (either by being proprietary, lacking decent clients, having embarrassing protocol decisions, being obscure, etc), there isn’t really much other choice (that’s not to say IRC is anywhere close to without flaws but it’s simple, low barrier of entry, and resilient)
Yes, officer. This blasphemer right here.
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.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.
Ofc if they dont know GNU 😆
Also true. Feel free to make an informational post on the matter.
The fsf website actually separates distros. There is GNU/Linux and nonGNU/linux
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
Its nonGNU/linux
Blasphemy!
/s
Alpine’s great, it’s my go-to lightweight/server distro, just really wish they had an option for glibc, musl is just way too limiting for a daily driver…
Doesnt play ball with Zerotier anymore.
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These examples didn’t actually clear anything up for me 🙃
