“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.
Also, Unix ≠ Linux.
It’s only called UNIX if it comes from the Santa Cruz region of California, otherwise it’s a sparkling POSIX.
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
No, you said Linux is not equal to Unix, which is also technically correct.
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.
