I take GNU Linux to be GNU-flavoured Linux. Musl and Busybox still behave like GNU, since they were written as alternatives to GNU (at least busybox). Alpine belongs in the same category as regular Linux distros - unlike Android.
More important than this distinction though, is the philosophy behind them. Despite the difference in license, Musl and Busybox still value freedom, like GNU. Android is a monstrosity - a wolf in sheep’s clothing. A malware masquerading as open source.
This takes the alternate history to a crazy new level.
GNU was written to mimic / replace UNIX—POSIX specifically. The standard core utilities and the idea of a C library pre-date GNU.
BSD was already a complete and free UNIX system when the GNU project was started and long before the Linux kernel was conceived.
MUSL is in no way “GNU-flavoured”. It is an an alternative C library sure. That is what Glibc is. They are both implementations of the same standard. MUSL prides itself in being more standards compliant. What critics dislike about MUSL is that it is not enough like GNU.
BusyBox is an alternative to the standard UNIX userland. I think it is fair to say it is an alternative to the GNU utils as those are the most common but the history of most of these tools goes back further than GNU.
Would you consider FreeBSD a GNU-flavoured system too?
Philosophy probably did play a significant role: Google could have chosen BusyBox, which is GPL licensed, if their concern was solely the GNU user space’s comparative bloat.
Alpine’s great, it’s my go-to lightweight/server distro, just really wish they had an option for glibc, musl is just way too limiting for a daily driver…
The GNU project gave birth to and spread the idea of free software worldwide. Would they not have started with the GNU operating system (they wrote a LOT of code) and doing activism then free software would surely not exist in the magnitude it does today.
The Linux kernel would not be this mainstream at all. Spiritually, this makes every popular free OS a GNU system. Even BSD was only freed because Stallman explicitly requested it. Credit where credit is due.
Arguably yes, but none of that is a good reason to put GNU in the name. I don’t think even Stallman argued that Linux distributions should use the name GNU to give credit to GNU’s influence.
The reason always given is a different one: it’s because distros traditionally took a lot of code from the GNU project, which is a different matter. That reasoning does make some kind of sense, even though I don’t fully agree.
It’s not that they “took a lot of code from the GNU project”, it’s that “Linux” is the kernel, which is just the core of the OS, by itself it’s not very useful. All the stuff around it that constitutes the rest of the operating system, like the command line and the vast majority of the commands you might run from there, are the GNU project. And I’m not even getting into desktop environments.
GNU wants people to believe that Linux distros took the GNU project, replaced the unfinished GNU Hurd kernel with Linux, and called it a day. But distros collected a lot of other stuff too.
XFree86 and various window managers (back in the early 90s there were no free/open source desktop environments yet; KDE (1996) was the first I think, or at the very least earlier than Gnome. I don’t know what you mean by “And I’m not even getting into desktop environments.”: the way I see it, the topic X and everything running on it doesn’t exactly support your point.
Editors vi and vim are not from GNU, and neither are mail clients Pine and Mutt, and the popular pager less.
There was probably quite a lot of BSD code in Linux distributions too.
So, I agree that calling a Linux distribution Linux is perhaps not entirely correct, but calling it GNU/Linux gives too much credit to GNU and too little to all the other people who wrote software that got included in Linux distros. GNU thinks their collection of software is essential enough to be included in the name, exclusively, and I don’t agree. Don’t get me wrong, GNU does deserve respect, and a lot of it, for all their accomplishments and contributions to the free source world in general and Linux distributions more specifically. But their insistence on the name GNU/Linux doesn’t seem the best way to get that respect. It has always felt somewhat childish to me.
At the same time, no one is stopping the GNU project from creating their own operating system distribution using their userland tools and the Linux kernel, and calling it whatever they want, including GNU or GNU/Linux or GNU Guix System or whatever, I don’t care. It would be quite hypocrytical if they wouldn’t include Linux in the name though, since including Linux is equivalent to how they’re asking others to include GNU.
I mostly agree with you, but I want to add that GNU was the leader from the start with the aim to create a complete, integrated operating system, rather than just a bunch of unrelated programs tossed together. It was not important to them that all the code was written by GNU, more so that there was a complete free system.
The idea was that one project worked on the display server, another on the desktop environment and so on, with the intent that all come together as “GNU”.
And then Linux came and took the name of what GNU anticipated to become.
XFree86 and various window managers (back in the early 90s there were no free/open source desktop environments yet; KDE (1996) was the first I think, or at the very least earlier than Gnome.
As a point of historical interest, XFCE actually holds the title of the oldest extant DE project; it beat KDE to first release by about a year.
KDE was also famously not entirely open source when it was founded (Qt was closed until v2), which is why GNOME was founded (initially by the GNU Project) exactly for this reason.
the implication that any popular piece of libre software owes anything to Stallman by the mere virtue of being libre is totally wrong.
Considering Linux: Linux was proprietary at first, until Torvalds was inspired by the free software movement to free it, even using GNU’s GPL. He later said that making Linux open source was the best decision he ever made, and I’m pretty sure that this would not have happened without the popularity of GNU and the movement reaching him. Linux would’ve been just another small proprietary kernel. So Torvalds owes a lot to Stallman.
Also, without GNU, Linux would not have been practically usable. Only after the hard work of combining Linux with the already huge codebase of GNU could Linux be meaningfully used and become popular.
In fact, Stallman’s version of “open” is deeply intertwined with the American version of what it means to be “free” politically
Well, “open source” gives you exactly the same freedoms as “free software” gives you, so proponents of “open source” can’t be that far off ideologically.
it has manifested so many times that there are several open projects with the entire goal of not using GNU components, code or licenses.
The code is already there and it’s usable. Not using it because you don’t like the person/organization seems a bit… misguided.
What a lazy response. You do realize that only one paragraph was an argument for calling it GNU/Linux and the rest of the comment regards other topics you yourself brought up in your last comment? Obviously it is not worth talking to you any longer, not because of diverging views but because of your manners…
And not all GNU is Linux! Beyond the world famous GNU Hurd, there’s also Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and Nexenta (GNU/Illumos, which is the OpenSolaris kernel).
I think the most esoteric of them, though, is GNU Darwin (GNU/XNU). Darwin is the open source parts of OS X, including its kernel, XNU. There used to be an OpenDarwin project to try to turn Darwin into an actual independent operating system, but they failed, and were superseded by PureDarwin, which took a harder line against anything OS X getting into the system. GNU Darwin took it one step further and removed just about all of Darwin (except XNU) and replaced it with GNU instead.
“I use Linux as my operating system,” I state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. “Actually”, he says with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!’ I don’t miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn’t include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. It’s Linux, but it’s not GNU+Linux.
The smile quickly drops from the man’s face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams “I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT’S STILL GNU!” Coolly, I reply “If windows was compiled With gcc, would that make it GNU?” I interrupt his response with “-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even you were correct, you wont be for long.”
With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man’s life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I’ve womansplained him to death.
I really think the existing maintainers need to strengthen this. A microkernel sounds like a very good concept, and new college graduates often dont know C or even C++ anymore. Me included, if I would learn a low level language I see no purpose for anything but Rust
It’s unfortunate that Go has become so popular at the expense of modern system programming languages like Rust and Nim and Zig. Go is such a platypus: a compiled language that isn’t a proper system language.
Honestly when I first read that I just assumed that ChimeraOS decided to go in an new direction. Also it’s not like ChimeraOS is some small super niche distro it seems relatively popular.
Chimera aims to eliminate legacy cruft where possible to deliver a modern, general purpose, fully featured operating system that is simple but complete.
While on their Community page:
Our primary means of communication is IRC. […] We ask you to refrain from using advanced Matrix features, such as reactions, editing, message removal, markup and multi-line messages while using the chat. This is because users on IRC side will either not see that or it will clutter the channel. Stick to simple, plain text messages, like you would if you were on IRC.
Do you think they’re aware of the irony of relying on crusty old IRC while touting about Linux having legacy cruft and their code being better?
@entropicdrift would you mind elaborating how the choice of a chat protocol is connected to technical aspects of an operating system? i feel like i'm not galaxy brain enough for that
Over on the OS side they’re dedicated to making a fresh start and leaving behind crufty old standards, but on their chat server they’ve limited their chat tech to the capabilities of IRC, a chat protocol so old it pre-dates Linux.
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