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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
I think the only reason people really have for calling it GNU/Linux is to raise awareness about the Free Software movement and its agenda.
The line between “kernel” and “the rest of the OS” is and has always been a fuzzy one. I think RMS would consider GCC to be part of the OS, but I’ve never seen an Android device with a compiler installed. (And I’ve sometimes done *GNU/*Linux installations and never gone on to install GCC, though usually I end up installing GCC at some point.)
I don’t think it’s more “correct” to call it “GNU/Linux” than “Linux” per se. (After all, if we’re going down that rabbithole, should I be calling it “Syslinux/Systemd/etc/etc/etc/GNU/Linux?”)
But, if you’re ideologically aligned with the Free Software movement and want to see more awareness of its mission (and full disclosure, that describes me) then by all means, call it “GNU/Linux” if you like.
All that said, I do think a lot of folks who insist on calling it “GNU/Linux” strongly believe not only that it’s good for awareness about Free Software, but also that it’s more “correct” to call it “GNU/Linux.”
And I’ll also say I can kindof understand why people might feel it’s more correct. From RMS’ perspective, he and some other folks were off building an OS and they had it mostly done and people started using the GNU work with a Linux kernel. But still, that historical argument holds less water every year.
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.
Depending what exactly you mean by “ideological purity,” I might somewhat disagree with you.
I definitely want there to (continue to) exist an organization pushing for all software to be FOSS. If the Free Software movement didn’t exist but the OSS movement did, I expect there’d be much less FOSS out there. There are a lot of projects out there that don’t have a good OSS movement reason for existing. Coreboot, for instance. Arguably to a large extent Wine as well. And LineageOS and GrapheneOS. And OpenWRT. Not to mention ~(GNU/)~Linux itself. I don’t imagine most OSS folks to be quite so motivated to want fully-FOSS-from-soup-to-nuts kind of options as Free Software folks are.
There are plenty of software companies publishing more proprietary software for Linux and plenty of OSS folks heralding that as a huge win. For the most part, I see that as unfortunate. And I have reasons why that I can point to that wouldn’t be seen (well… quite as much, at least) as tinfoil-hat levels of paranoia.
And then there’s copyleft. I think that’s a fuckin’ great thing that’s needed more now than ever, but (and I don’t know for sure… correct me if you think I’m wrong, but) I think that’s more of a thing among Free Software folks than among Open Source folks.
And I don’t think any of the above could have come about or at least been quite as prominent today as they are without such an ideologically-motivated movement. The FSF put a very aggressive line in the sand saying “proprietary software shouldn’t exist.” Basically the main thing that distinguishes the OSS movement from the Free Software movement is tolerance of proprietary software.
Also, I don’t really know for sure the extent to which this is actually the case for OSS folks as a whole, but ESR’s “the solution to everything is more capitalism” is pretty fucked up.
That said, I 110% agree the Free Software movement needs to be doing mostly everything it can to distance itself from RMS.
Richard M. Stallman. Origin of the whole idea of “Free Software,” founder of the Free Software Foundation and GNU Project, guy who said some of Epstein’s sex trafficking victims probably enjoyed it.
Oh, and ESR is Eric Raymond, cofounder of the Open Source Initiative and rabid Libertarian.
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?
I’ve only been using Linux seriously for the last couple of years.
The way I see it, Linux is a kernel AND drivers, GNU is code that can be compiled to build a toolset used to daily-drive the kernel and a distribution is a assembly of kernel, drivers, tools and software (apps).
seeing your second last image text, I think you’re making it seem like those who call GNU/Linux ate pretentious, which is most often not the case.
I say GNU/Linux for ideological reasons. Even GNU website itself says not to force people about it. Debian’s official name is Debian GNU/Linux. So, it’s not about “sounding smart.” there’s more to it.
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.
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.
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
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