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?
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
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
I’m more or less philosophically and ideologically aligned with the FSF, but don’t really want to bring attention to them as they seem far more interested in ideological purity than actually doing good work or being actually useful, which is a massive turn off for most people.
They’re also still doggedly aligned with RMS who’s, honestly, a hot mess. At best, he’s embarrassing and off-putting and would rather argue over Linux vs “gu-new slash Linux” (and insisting on pronouncing gnu incorrectly and citing a song that was actually making fun of people pronouncing it that way) than talk about things that actually matter for the cause, and will refuse to work with anyone who doesn’t do things his way (and at worst… Well, there’s all the stuff that got him temporarily kicked out of the FSF, and them bringing him back after that all came out was not good for the community).
Ideological purity is actually harmful to the free sharing of knowledge and ideas, which is what they claim to be for.
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.
I’d say Knoppix for that. You’re not really doing this for your daily driver, you’re just dealing with an urgent need to get you through your current predicament
Except for Gentoo, for some odd reason they’ve never included it in the stage tarball so it always has to be installed manually
Which is even weirder when you realize it is included on the live install iso, so you’ll be using it up until you chroot and all of a sudden find it’s not available anymore