Les Mikesell wrote: > Linux has always been just a kernel. But what you usually describe is a > complete distribution. And when you talk about a complete distribution, do you call it "Linux" or do you call it "Fedora" or "CentOS" or "Slackware"? > I can't recall ever having any reason to have a > name for a subset of a distribution that only included the GNU > components and the kernel. Can someone who uses this term explain the > circumstances where it is useful? This subset rarely/never exists by > itself and it doesn't make much sense to name it, although you might > need to talk about the kernel specifically or the complete distribution > as a whole. The application I work on in my job uses some Linux-specific features and some GNU-specific ones. It wouldn't be nearly as good if we'd use only POSIX interfaces. We could probably port it to one of the BSDs for example, and we might achieve similar performance there, but currently it requires GNU and Linux so it could be described as a GNU/Linux application. But I mostly agree. I often make statements about Linux that have nothing to do with GNU, and then I say "Linux". I also often make statements about various GNU programs, and then I say "Bash" or "GCC" or "Emacs" or whatever. When I say something about a whole distribution, it's usually not true for all distributions, and then I say "Ubuntu" or "Gentoo" and so on. But sometimes I want to say something about all distributions that are based on GNU and Linux. Then I call them "GNU/Linux-based distributions". If I wanted to include Debian GNU/Hurd and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD too, but not FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD, then I'd say "GNU-based distributions". Björn Persson -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
