Tim wrote: > The majority will understand "Linux" as being an OS, the whole thing, > one of the many OS distros that are similar to each other (*), but not > understand it as referring to just the kernel. And then you'll hear arguments like "You think Windows is bloated? Linux is *much* worse! Look, Debian is twenty-one CDs! Thirteen gigabytes! My, what a horribly bloated OS!". They think "the whole thing" is the OS, and so they compare "the Windows OS" to "the Linux OS", not understanding that Debian is a huge collection of programs more comparable to Windows plus Office plus Visual Studio plus MS SQL Server plus Photoshop plus lots and lots of other third-party programs, and that nobody will ever install all those 13 GB of Debian packages. That's a misunderstanding, and they'll continue misunderstanding until you explain to them that the distribution contains much more than an operating system – or that you only need a small part of the operating system to operate the system, or however you choose to say it. > There's no lack of understanding > when one person says to another that they use Linux. They mean they use > an OS which has Linux at it's heart. Let's see how much that statement really tells the other person. If someone says he's using Linux, he's most likely using the kernel Linux and the GNU core utilities. Someone who talks that way probably also uses a GUI, so we can assume X, but we can't tell whether he's using Gnome or KDE. We also don't know if he has Apache or BIND running, or some database or other server. We can't even tell whether packages are managed by RPM, DPKG or Emerge. So the meaning that the word "Linux" conveys in this case is pretty much "Linux, GNU and X", right? Björn Persson -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
