Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Ackchyually, not every Linux is a GNU Linux (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by davel@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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Some examples:

Android
Alpine: Alpine Linux is built around musl libc and busybox
glaucus: A simple and lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and toybox
Chimera (alpha stage): Chimera uses a novel combination of core tools from FreeBSD, the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library

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[+] vrt3 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] Malfeasant@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[+] vrt3 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

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[–] Patch@feddit.uk 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] jack@monero.town -1 points 2 years ago

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.