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Comment by Sanddancer | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I know what it means and includes. Android, which is one of the biggest unixes right now, doesn't use GNU. iOS, which is another one of the biggest unixes right now, doesn't use GNU. Most embedded linuxes don't use GNU. So yes, for the parts of unix which are visible to most people, the gnu parts are not very relevant at all.

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While this is true, there is still a unix-like userland typically, at least in the form of busybox or somesuch..

I think there is some value in denoting 'linux the kernel' from 'linux the unix-like system', especially in the face of those systems which mainly use 'linux the kernel' in a non unix-like way, such as here..

e.g.: the 'gnu parts' (e.g. unix-style userland) are hugely important for me in a workstation - I could not do work in a system that doesn't provide the 'gnu(unix) like' user interface. On a phone/consumer/browser device, this is not so much the case

But they are for the "Linux Desktop", hence the joke.

A device using the linux kernel (or Mach kernel in iOS) doesn't make it a "Unix" or "Unix-like" system, despite that same kernel being used in other truly Unix-like systems. The user land (aka GNU in most Linux distros) is what makes it a Unix-like system. That doesn't mean GNU isn't relevant, it means what you considered a "Unix-like" system was overly broad.

This reply is a bit overly pedantic and I apologize, but you kept pushing so I wanted to clarify.

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