Saying GNU/Linux does not give that message to 99% of people though. If I say that the SteamDeck actually runs on GNU/Linux to a normie gamer, they are more likely to be like “ok, that sounds confusing I’ll stick to xbox”. And anyone within the community already gets it. We all know the meme, we all get it. Semantics goes both ways. Sometimes you win hearts and minds, and sometimes you just annoy people who don’t care.
And in the name of semantics, “attribution” and “credit” are not the same. I’m obligated to say IceWeasel, or as I’ve taken to calling it, “The libre Firefox fork known as IceWeasel”… It’s important to call it by the full name every time, because Firefox is really the basis of 99.9% of the code in the repo. The repo gives full attribution to firefox and mozilla, but when we refer to it, we never actually give credit to the original.
And since we don’t need to call out the original if we fork something, if I fork GNU-utils and call it linux-OS-utils. And then build on my own distro, would that be a fully Linux OS? Even though its functionally and codewise identical to a “GNU/Linux” distro?