Comment by cherryteastain
2 months ago
Android is Linux
Android is not GNU/Linux.
Article talks about GNU/Linux clearly. There is a point to the whole "I'd like to interject for a moment..." copypasta and Android's situation is the clearest illustration of it.
The article talks about browsers that use Linux in the user agent. This includes Alpine Linux - which is not GNU/Linux. It also splits out Chrome OS which is pretty much GNU/Linux.
Alpine and GNU/Linux are Posix, while Android is not.
I don't think Posix is very relevant to what is or isn't linux.
macOS is more posix than NixOS, but everyone knows NixOS is a real linux distro, and macOS is not one.
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> Article talks about GNU/Linux clearly.
There are Linux distributions that don't use the GNU userland. Should we start being pedantic about that? And say Busybox/Linux or MyCustomThingy/Linux etc?
And actually, were you talking about GNU/Linux/Xorg, or GNU/Linux/Wayland? Can I also ask people to mention which libc they use? Alpine is OpenRC/Busybox/musl/Linux, which is not systemd/GNU/glibc/Linux.
So yeah... Desktop Linux is not worse a way to describe an OS than GNU/Linux.
> There is a point to the whole "I'd like to interject for a moment..." copypasta and Android's situation is the clearest illustration of it.
Well… :-)
With you in spirit, but to add to the mess, one could argue Alpine (and Postmarket OS) is a standard Linux distro, but non GNU.
"GNU/" cannot be used for clarifying things anymore.