With that recent post about chrome os not counting as a distro of linux. It does bring a good question, what is a distro of linux?

If Linux is just a kernel then android and chrome os are Linux. Bur no really considers android a distro of linux. So linux is more then a kernel.

KDE say that neon is not a distro but doesn’t really why neon is not but kubuntu is.

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7 points

My understanding is that is has to have a certain level of the GNU core utilities in combination with the Kernel but yeah not really, it’s hard to define, maybe the use of a package manager? Definitely nothing to do with GUI, probably a philosophy in mind, not sure at all to be honest.

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10 points

It is hard. We had Chimera Linux posted here yesterday, which has no GNU code at all. None of the early Linux distributions had package managers. The best I can tell, “pms” (package management system) written for Bogus Linux in 1993 was the earliest, but package management didn’t hit the mainstream until at least 1995. Slackware didn’t get a package manager until the mid-2000s. But we still all consider them distributions. (Right?)

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7 points

a certain level of the GNU core utilities

Wouldn’t that make Alpine, or OpenWRT, not a distro?

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