The older I get the more I think RMS is rather full of himself insisting that this OS must be called “GNU/Linux”, or even just “GNU”.
Here is my own take on the situation:
GNU was a - for its time - very ambitious project in the 1980s to create a UNIX-like free operating system, that never actually succeeded in its goal (ignoring some borderline unusable alpha versions of GNU/HURD that came out long after people stopped caring), but produced some useful general purpose computing tools in its attempt. When the first Linux distributions came out in the early nineties, they took many of those tools plus many other tools from other projects and bundled it together with many tools of their own for installing, booting and managing the whole thing into an actual, complete and working OS. These days, everything single one of those components from the GNU project can be and sometimes is replaced with something else while still keeping the whole thing recognizable as a Linux system.
To say the whole package is now “the GNU system” or “GNU, just with a Linux kernel” is borderline at best. If you squint a lot you can maybe see there’s a point hidden in there somewhere, but presenting this interpretation of things as a straight-forward fact is disingenuous at best. The truth is, RMS tried to make an operating system but failed. (And all jokes and memes aside, Emacs is not actually a full operating system.) Later, other people who also wanted to create an operating system took some of the pieces from the GNU project, plus the Linux kernel, plus various other pieces from elsewhere, plus some stuff they wrote themselves and succeeded. Admittedly, their success was due to, in large part, those GNU components, but that does not mean that the resulting project is the GNU system.
“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.
And yet, if GNU and Linux didn’t come together to form this Operating System, whatever you want to call it, the parts that form this OS would have never become popular, and thus Alpine wouldn’t exist, and chances are this conversation would not have been happening. (just playing Devil’s advocate)
I type in a command without sudo, I prefer to type in a sudo !! rather than to up arrow, then do Ctrl+A then type sudo and press Enter, for example. I wanted to install Nix earlier, but I needed to be in a POSIX shell for it to work, so I had to switch to bash for the installation. Those are just 2 examples from earlier today, and while you can learn to deal with them, it would juat be more effective to use a POSIX shell instead. It also means I can just set it as my login shell instead of having each of my terminal keybinds as kitty -e fish, across all of my many window manager configs. Fish is faster, but I’m not sure if the cost is worthwhile.
I prefer to type in a sudo !! rather than to up arrow, then do Ctrl+A then type sudo and press Enter
Fish has a hotkey for this built-in, just hit Alt + S.
The login shell troubles are very valid however. I worked around them by modifying my .bashrc to drop me into fish, and it has been working pretty well for me so far.
The linked solution also handles only launching fish if the parent process is not fish, so you can still access bash easily for when you really need it.
He’s not wrong. It is GNU Linux but we all just say Linux for short. I think he’s point is that all the work he and his team did was not minor and it’s still used today. Your can understand why he would want some recognition. Wouldn’t you want that if years of your work made such a meaningful contribution? And it’s not like he’s making money off if it either. So let’s allow him to have some credit. It’s not harming anyone.
Btw he is very correct on the principle of Freedom of Computing. It’s more than just open source. The code must respect the user and his freedom. And today with the complete errosion of privacy this principle is more important than ever.
That’s why I use Linux. But because I fl want to pay for software, but because it respects my freedom. If Linux ever stops doing that I’d have to find another OS.
Everyone forgets this core principle: all these Apple and Windows users just think it’s about what the computer/phone can do for me, with zero thought to the fact that these devices don’t respect their freedom and in most cases are actually spying on them and milking them.
What I like about Android is that it’s open source which means there are lots of eyes on the code, although it doesn’t fully respect my freedom. But it’s better than iOS or Windows mobile etc. And if you really want to, you can install something like Lineage and essentially use AOSP which is the purely open source part.
It’s a pity that Ubuntu Touch never succeeded because that would have been a user freedom respecting OS.
I use Linux at home but as an IT technician have experience with Nvidia in the Windows world. And it was pretty terrible there too.
You have to create an Nvidia account just to get the latest driver (🤦♀️) and despite its supposed prowess Photoshop struggled. Solidworks (CAD Software) also had issues with Nvidia and would only work with specific driver versions.
Overall a real pain.
I would only recommend AMD especially on Linux as they say least provide open source drivers. Plus their CPU’s are actually very good. I’ve seen some ancient pcs running Windows 10 on AMD CPU’s.
After getting my hands on unix at work but unable to afford the cost to run it at home, I discovered a version of Slackware that installed in a folder on my Windows desktop. It only took a few weeks of playing around before I set up a dedicated server (which was then hacked within the first week, pushing me to learn about this thing called a “firewall”) Whew it’s been almost 24 years now and I’ve been happily using Debian for nearly half that time.
What do you mean by the cost? Because you didn’t want to wipe out your Windows OS? I’ve been running distros on my personal PC for 23 years now. Can’t say I’ve ever spent money on it except for some cheap CDs. I think I even got distro cds for cheap that came with linux magazines.
If you wanted to run actual Unix, there was a significant licensing fee. That’s one of the reasons Linux took off, because it did all the same things but was free.
I mean the BSDs have been around since what? The late 80s? With the more “mainstream” distros (Free and Net) since the early 90s… The 80s if you count NextSTEP and SunOS!
But I get what you mean, there’s a reason Bell was forced to relinquish it’s code with anti-trust laws!
I think it was around '99 that I got into this. The internet was quickly building momentum, I finally had DSL available, and I happened to run across a reference to linux. I had been searching for an alternative to Windows for awhile already (I still have a CD with OS2/Warp on it) so the idea that not only could I replace my desktop, but I could also run free servers??? My mind was blown. It took me another six years to get my desktop to where I could truly ditch Windows completely but I’ve never looked back.
I was a mac guy in the 90s, which was rather unpopular. I started just experimenting with stuff to expand my horizons. In ~97 I started playing with BeOS, and NetBSD. The latter was pretty much the only thing that had a native boot loader for the OpenFirmware. Played a bit with Yellow Dog Linux and MKLinux after that, but NetBSD remained my go to. I almost fully switched in the early 00s but OSX came out and being Unix system I stuck around. By the mid 00s I was using a mix of NetBSD and Debian/Ubuntu for servers, and a couple years later fully switched to Debian to have one single OS that I could use everywhere.
Had to reply because this is kind of the opposite of my story.
I grew up in the 90’s using Windows at home and pre-UNIX Macs at school. The Macs were trash and I was totally pro-Windows back then.
Then Mac OS X came out at school and damn, that UNIX goodness brought a ton to the table.
But being a kid, I couldn’t afford a Mac so around the Windows XP era I started getting into Linux. Unfortunately none of the distros worked great on my Dell (which my parents totally shocked me by buying one Christmas) so I was stuck installing on some ancient IBM ThinkPad built for Windows 3.1 but capable of running Windows 2000.
I spent my most of my mid- to late teens on Red Hat Linux and later Ubuntu (like the first release though).
Once I was 18 I saved up and bought my first MacBook Pro.
So these days I use macOS as an everyday desktop OS but run Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi (and any Docker image I create) as well as FreeBSD for any VPS I might need. I prefer the BSD’s to UNIX (especially FreeBSD) but unfortunately do rely on Docker for development work.
I never heard of that one. A distro that I used for a few years was called “Mage” though, which provided what I thought any of them should have been doing. I eventually stumbled on Ubuntu, but they burned me so many times trying to run servers, that’s when I finally got on Debian. Nothing worse than having their security updates destroy all network access, and still having the ticket open at least 15 years later (I was still getting pinged from other people running into the same issue on bugzilla).
No. I use tmux only inside the distrobox / podman dev container (which is also Debian 12 Stable). I like a more conventional DE for non-dev related usage of the computer. If I wanted a totally tmux-like or terminal-based environment I would go with i3, but that is not something I prefer for my desktop usage for non-coding activities.
It’s in the Snap Store as a release candidate. But sure if it will let you install it but Canonical seems to have it and be in the verification stage before releasing to stable.
Xubuntu for “I need this to just work” daily driving, and assorted other stuff for screwing around with. I like the idea of immutable OSes and have considered silverblue and am watching the development of vanillaos…
Xubuntu has been my go-to so I installed 23.04 on both my wife’s new computer, her netbook and our htpc recently. Turns out it ships with a broken xfce4-screensaver that crashes when you try to unlock the computer and you get stuck (unless you switch to a virtual console and kill the process). A xubuntu dev was helpful and directed me to a ppa that had a patched version, but I was still surprised that such a central feature wasn’t working.
In addition there appears to be some kind of screen blanking that I haven’t been able to disable. At first I just turned off the screen saver and all power saving features in the control panel, but the htpc would still turn off the monitor if left alone for some time, and then refuse to turn it back on unless I switched back and forth between virtual terminals while the TV was turned off. It got a little bit better after uninstalling xfce4-power-manager, and now the screen can be woken by moving the mouse, but it shouldn’t turn off at all since it’s supposed to be disabled.
I hope they manage to sort all those things out. I used Xubuntu for 5+ years with almost no issues.
Yeeeerah, I tried 23.04 too and was surprised how buggy bits of it are. I had screensaver issues too, though not quite as bad. I never could manage to get the notification widget to actually work. I gave up and dropped back to 22.04 LTS.
The Linux community doesn’t understand what “just works” really means.
Whether windows or mac, I plug my machine to the docking station, and it just works.
With Linux, every day a different problem. Out of the blue, screens just stop working. Resolutions change. Every restart different behavior. Zero consistency.
I’m not 17 anymore… I don’t have the time to keep tweaking. I need to be productive.
So what do I do? I SSH to a Linux machine whose desktop environment I don’t wanna see, and code remotely. Most productive setting.
@TheQuantumPhysicist @leninmummy
This is another one of those things I've heard about but not experienced, I use my computer every day and haven't had any issues in over a year at this point
Try using screens with different resolutions at the same time. Always gave me trouble. In my case was always using a horizontal one and a vertical one together. I’ve had framerate problems, tearing, artefacts (parts of the vertical screen wouldn’t update while the other 2 worked fine). From time to time, X will forget my monitor configuration too after a reboot / unplugging the dock / waking from sleep. All that with 2 laptops from different brands using different docstations, one with XFCE on Ubuntu and the other with KDE on Arch. I got it mostly working, but it’s still troublesome
Yup, I suspect that is indeed the issue. Haven’t tried KDE in wayland yet as I’ve seen some people saying it’s still a bit rough. Will give it a try anyway. May give sway another shot too
you hit the nail on the head. When I first got into linux I was watching some youtube video about I think the pine phone and the person basically came to the realization, and you can see the sadness on his face, that people want their computer to work like an kitchen appliance. Plug it in, press button, it does it thing. No need to learn about how it works.
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