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.
Linux is just a kernel in the same sense that a disto is just a package manager and an init system. Technically that’s the case but colloquially a distro is any set of curated, pre-configured packages with an install script.
Chrome OS is 100% a distro by induction, because Gentoo is a distro and Chrome OS is based on Gentoo.
As for Android: I’d say it is a distro, but most people think of desktop or server OSs when they talk about distros these days. Obviously it’s neither of these.
KDE Neon is a testing vehicle for new KDE software. The devs don’t consider it a distro because it’s not meant to distribute anything. It’s for testing and they don’t (have to) beyond that. So this has nothing to do with how this OS behaves, looks or whatever.
Idk I know they don’t fit into the usual open source box of Linux but I’d consider Android and ChromeOS as Linux distros, a distro is just a collection of software distributed with the Linux kernel as far as I’m aware. If someone doesn’t consider them “Linux distros” it’s probably due to the proprietary nature of some of the software surrounding the kernel. No idea why kde thinks neon isnt a distro when it literally is.
Edit: in the case of chrome os it’s not even just built around the kernel, it’s based on a distro.
If it distributes Linux, it’s a distro. Thus ChromeOS, Android, Windows are all Linux distros.
If you have a different definition, best you can do with it is go brighten up some lawyer’s day, I guess.
Windows
Uhhh, well I’d say it’s more like a hypervisor if we’re really pushing it with WSL
Windows distributes Linux, through its repositories, ergo Windows a Linux distribution.
What does it do with it then – acts as a hypervisor or sings its source aloud backwards – is an orthogonal question.
What does it do with it then […] is an orthogonal question.
Hm, ok if we take the word “distribution” for it lexical meaning then maybe, although wouldn’t that be “distributor”?
In this field “distribution” is the set of things that constitute the software package, by extension, in the case of free software, it is more a synonym of “flavor” since anyone can redistribute with their own changes added on top. You wouldn’t call a supermarket a Cocacola distribution, it’s a distributor, but the drinks themselves are the distributions (tho in my mind “distributed” sounds more fitting at this point).
If having a system of OS and server, both property of one maker, where the server distributes a form of an OS x (even just the source code) and the client OS can download those files, make the OS a distribution of x, then I can set up a computer with e.g. OpenBSD (with my own modifications to make it mine) that downloads an Ubuntu ISO from my server, then I load up that ISO into a virtual machine and now I magically turned OpenBSD into an Ubuntu distribution??
Me OMW to argue my pointless argument
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.
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?)
