• Laurel Raven
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    472 years ago

    I still don’t get why a toolchain that can be replaced but never was able to make a stable kernel of its own after twenty years should get top billing in the name of the OS. A lot of that stuff was left in the dust, its relevance to the system grows smaller each year while the Linux kernel is the only reason they were ever able to make a complete OS in the first place.

    Hardly anyone uses GNU without Linux; way more people use Linux without GNU than with it.

    Plus, the community at large has decided long ago that the name is just Linux… Does it matter that that’s the name of the kernel? No. Windows and MacOS aren’t named after their kernels, or their toolchains, or any other component.

    Anyway, there wasn’t an OS until there was Linux to bring it all together.

    • Queue
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      42 years ago

      Even now with more eyes on GNU, Herd still isn’t a serious kernel. BSD has more users and support than GNU Herd.

      I thank the GNU community for making wonderful tools and making libre software possible, but it doesn’t exactly deserve top billing.

      Linux without GNU can live, with BusyBox or Android. GNU without Linux would have never taken off. Though I’m curious if in another timeline without GNU, Linux might not have taken off, as GNU had all the tools but no kernel.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        There was no need to develope Hurd after linus torvals came out with Linux. It’s more important to develop drivers.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        Well we have Linux as the kernel now, and with linux-libre and FreeBSD there’s no real need for another kernel. So no reason for anyone to invest in it. I do think Hurd is kind of interesting conceptually, and it’s at a point where you can actually run it now.

        And yeah, without GNU, I’m not convinced Linus would’ve bothered with Linux. GNU was off the ground long before Linux was production ready.

        • Laurel Raven
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          22 years ago

          Linus didn’t write Linux for GNU, though, he wrote it as a response to Minix which, if memory serves, was written by one of his professors and took a hard minimalist approach for teaching purposes and Linus wanted to make something actually practical.

          Hell, it had to be adapted to work with GNU (or GNU adapted to work with Linux, I don’t remember which) so, if GNU’s absence meant Linus didn’t write his kernel, it would have been a very indirect result

    • Hyggyldy
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      42 years ago

      Sounds like a good basis for some kind of techno-fantasy media.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      Linus is the one who got a workable thing out in the public’s hands. He didn’t even want to name it Linux, but someone came up with that name and it stuck.

      The GNU project did a lot of great things, but ultimately they weren’t able to get a full-fledged operating system out that people could use, so they lost the opportunity to name it. It really shouldn’t matter to them though. GNU is well known, its philosophies are critical to how the free software and open source communities work, it was basically a massive success in the way almost no other volunteer non-commercial projects ever are.

      But tagging “GNU/” in front of Linux is dumb.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        I don’t think tagging GNU in front of Linux is dumb, people wouldn’t care to figure out who they are and what its about if they didn’t do that. You have to give credit to both of them. I still would want GNU there, even if I don’t say it most of the time. I call it Linux mostly but sometimes I call it GNU plus Linux just to be accurate.

    • @[email protected]
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      42 years ago

      The argument would be that on Linux, the majority of user-facing interactions are with GNU software, not the kernel.

      Also, without GNU, Linux probably wouldn’t even exist, at last not in its current form. GNU was already a mature toolchain when Linus started working on Linux. So it’s all well and good to point out that Linux can get pulled out and combined with other toolchain, but you can say the same with GNU. It’s out there running with BSD and Darwin. And BSD might not have a ton of direct users, but it’s extremely important for servers.

      You don’t need Linux to run a free operating system, which was the goal of GNU, it really doesn’t matter that Hurd was never completed. The goal was achieved so there hasn’t been much incentive to develop Hurd.

      I personally don’t care what people call it, but I do think GNU deserves the recognition. Especially because some of their tools are extremely important, like gcc. Linux might not exist if gnu hadn’t provided a functional toolset for an operating system. Hell if it wasn’t for GNU, we might not have a free OS at all.

      • Laurel Raven
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        32 years ago

        Without GNU, we’d probably be using variants of FreeBSD or similar, possibly even porting that toolchain to run on Linux kernel… I mean, their contribution was important, but so were a lot of other people and projects

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      Right? Most of the time when I build linux I’m not using GNU because of its burdensome license. Realistically you usually don’t need most of the binaries anyway, and those you do like echo and ls are trivial to reimplement, at least for their common functionality.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 years ago

      That might be difficult.

      Linux was made to run GNU software, and is borderline part of GNU. GNU, likewise, is made open, much like the Linux kernel, so it can run on anything.

      I don’t know of any software designed for the Linux kernel that doesn’t also expect GNU.

      Look, all I’m saying is that the two are very strongly bonded, like hydrogen and oxygen in a molecule of water. It would take a lot of energy to separate them. Adding to them is pretty trivial, there’s a lot of things that are water soluble by default, but without specific conditions and a lot of energy, they won’t seperate easily.

      Honestly, I think the only OS I know of that’s the closest to being Linux but not GNU, is Android.

      • bruhduh
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        2 years ago

        Wayland can’t run on BSD as I’ve heard so GNU can’t run on anything, i may be wrong though, because my source is posts on internet, but as I’ve heard BSD users want x-server support to continue

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        Alpine Linux exists. But yeah, most of these projects pretty much do the same thing as their GNU counterparts, just outside the license.

  • @[email protected]
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    22 years ago

    I would agree with the “Linux is an OS” people but they are the same ones who insist that Android isn’t Linux which is wrong.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    If you agree with the guy on the left, you would also have to call Chrome OS “Chrome OS/Linux” to be consistent. It sounds dumb because it is

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    Linux is a name, not a description of the parts. It can mean just the kernel, or the entire family of operating systems, depending on the context.

    It’s what we settled on, and there is no point in debating the name unless there is a real problem with it.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    Just to be clear:

    It was actually the young guy throwing the chair in the show. His text is supposed to be saying something angrily at that panel.

    • Laurel Raven
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      22 years ago

      Yeah, that part of this meme didn’t make sense to me because of that… Like, he goes from calmly saying no big deal to yelling and throwing a chair in the middle of it for no reason?