GNU Users Who Have Never Heard of GNU (2006) | Hacker News Reader

GNU Users Who Have Never Heard of GNU (2006)

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53 pointsasamant61 comments

Most of the stuff in userland isn't GNU. What GNU brings to the table pales in comparison to the technical complexity of the kernel or the GUI stack. While the kernel has grown up over the years from a janky hobby project to be a sophisticated base for smartphones and supercomputers, GNU still provides a bunch of common Unix utilities from the 80s and a C standard library. Maybe it's time to recognize that they aren't pulling their weight to get top billing here.

Bull.

The takeaway from the article is that GNU is a marketing term. There are some more modern tools like Guix that the developers have chosen to make part of GNU. I'm sure GNU would welcome a newer kernel or GUI stack if the authors of those projects wanted to carry the banner.

err are you forgetting about GCC or something

(also theres emacs and 50 years of bloat have led to libc and common unix utilities ending up surprisingly complicated but i digress)

Most code these days is compiled using LLVM, thanks to mobile phones.

Most code doesn't end up on mobile phones.

I beg to differ

For a very very long time, Linux could only be compiled with GC, and you could only interact with it from userland with glibc. Don't forget GNOME or GNUStep. GNOME is the default GUI, window manager, solitaire player, etc. of Ubuntu.

There's also Mastodon, which is a variant of GNU Social.

Mastodon implemented Ostatus and currently uses ActivityPub, but its not a fork of GNU Social.

The vast majority of what runs on a modern Linux system doesn't come from GNU at all and that percentage is trending down over the years with things like LLVM making even the last few generally used core pieces replaceable. I don't think there's now anything to stop you from running a fully recognizable Linux distribution without any GNU software at all.

It was a silly argument to be getting into 10 years ago. These days it just seems like trying to take credit for other people's work. I have great respect for the GNU project and the GPL was a great invention that I use when I release stuff. Beating this dead horse just detracts from that.

The availability of alternatives does little to detract from the utility of what is actually used. Ex gcc

glibc and bash are needed to have a traditional Unix-like Linux-based system and I don't think they have any fully compatible replacements (musl and BSD sh aren't).

I think ZSH is a valid alternative to Bash.

OS X Catalina even made ZSH the default.

I don’t.

IIRC, not just a alternative, but a full super-set.

No, Zsh is not a full super-set of Bash.

To the extent this is true, it's because other software relies on specific features (and sometimes quirks) of bash and glibc, not because you can't have a workable Unix without them.

Which is to say - ironically, these last remaining dependencies wouldn't be there if open standards were followed more rigorously.

Ah yes, textbook "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy. Very ironic that GNU now looks like it's following this pattern (obviously unintentionally).

llvm-libc is in the planning stages.

Alpine Linux and many other distros use musl and busybox (non GNU projects, although busybox is GPL).

And I would definitely call them Unix systems, since they run almost all the same software.

Although GCC is still a good argument, since very few distros use Clang by default, I think mostly because of the Linux kernel.

Even macOS runs with GNU Bash.

Not for long, most likely.

Was replaced with zsh recently

Bash is still available.

Apple's Command Line Tools installer installs GNU Bash.

I like this description why people should mention GNU. With "open source software" or "Linux" or "Ubuntu" there are no moral implications, nothing to stand for except that it should do the job.

But GNU is different. The idea is to emphasize sharing and freedom and community.

In a world that is driven almost only by profit margins we do well to have some ideals.

GNU has enabled Linux and Ubuntu to come to life. Without GNU there wouldn't be any Linux as we know it today.

Also Torvalds had adopted the GNU GPL (what MS called the "cancer") for the kernel. Who knows where we would be if that wouldn't have been the case.

"Free" or "libre" also have moral implications, and are relevant even when calling something "GNU" would be inaccurate.

Linux stands on the shoulders of giants back to Turing, Lovelace, Babbage and indeed beyond.

https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU has the list of software that the GNU project provides. While most systems that run a Linux kernel will require having many of those installed (sed, tar, grep, gzip, bash...), most of the software running on most of these computers these days will not be from the GNU project.

Many users will likely never use any GNU software directly these days, and it is increasingly possible to build systems with less and less parts from the GNU project.

It would be fantastic for the GNU project's visibility if it expanded its focus on software that would potentially be more widely used directly by humans. Where's the GNU project's alternative to Zoom? Why is Savannah so far behind GitLab? Where are the GNU apps for mobile?

> Where are the GNU apps for mobile?

I'm sure they would have issues with supporting the locked-down nature of both of the major platforms, even though both (I believe) have nothing against GPL software on their "stores" today.

> It would be fantastic for the GNU project's visibility if it expanded its focus on software that would potentially be more widely used directly by humans.

Agreed, but...

> Where's the GNU project's alternative to Zoom?

https://jami.net/ (formerly GNU Ring), I think

> Why is Savannah so far behind GitLab?

I'm inclined to agree with this, moreso as I hadn't even realized until now that it was even a thing outside being used for official GNU repos (much like how Canonical's Bazaar is technically open source but 100% only ever intended to run Canonical's ... canonical... instance).

> Where are the GNU apps for mobile?

While the sibling comment is probably correct that GNU isn't fond of supporting nonFree platforms, ex. IceCat is on F-Droid.

"Canonical's Bazaar" .. do you mean launchpad.net?

Ah, darn it, yes you're correct. Bazzar is the vcs, not the site.

The GNU project and the free software movement in general are pretty out of touch with today's computer users. The most recent billion people who joined the Internet primarily use locked-down mobile devices, not machines capable of installing "the GNU/Linux operating system" as in decades past.

The closest a new user might come to using GNU software is if a web service they connect to happens to use one in the background.

> Why is Savannah so far behind GitLab?

I'd ask that question about most of the FOSS issue trackers/devops tools. Savannah, Bugzilla, Launchpad, mailing lists and git send-email are all IMHO absolutely terrible in many ways.

The web is important, but none of those tools take discoverability on the web seriously. Countless times I've searched for a solution for an issue of mine and end up digging trough unindexed Bugzilla instances or mailing lists and find the solution hours later. Such a waste. Heavens have mercy to newcomers, when one actually has to ask for clarification or report a bug, those tools are just plain and simple disrespectful because of how they waste people's time.

The below-average UI design they all have is a whole another topic, I'm all for functional UIs but those tools don't have to be so ugly and unnecessarily difficult to use. I find the wish for more contributors silly when many sites look like they've been abandoned two decades ago.

Most Linux users have never heard of Linux, either ;)

> Most people have never heard of GNU. Even most of the people who use the GNU system have never heard of GNU, since so many people and companies teach them to call it “Linux”. Indeed, GNU users often say they are “running Linux”, which is like saying you are “driving your carburetor” or “driving your transmission”.

Did Stallman really write this in 2006? Cars haven't had carburetors since the early 90s.

Listening to politicians debate this year has reminded me how most people's mental models of the world remain firmly stuck in the decades of their youth.

Cars with carburetors still haven't fully disappeared though.

I think stallman is only vaguely aware of anything newer than 1980.

Out of all the things to nitpick on, you choose that?

I usually refer to distributions like Debian or Fedora as GNU/Linux to distinguish them from other systems that use Linux kernel (e.g. Android). GNU defines the runtime environment, and by knowing that a system is GNU, we understand what software it is supposed to run. The kernel is mostly relevant for hardware support, the runtime defines software compatibility.

If we look deeper, we see that GNU/Linux is a C system, and I'd argue that this is the most essential characteristic ("An operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit inside a language; there shouldn’t be one” — Dan Ingalls, Design Principles Behind Smalltalk). Of course, GNU system supports many programming languages, but they all use C to interface with the system. Get familiar with non-C systems like Smalltalk or Oberon to see how programming language is essential. Also web browsers grew to become operating systems of their own (running on top of C systems for now) — the JavaScript systems.

Other users have touched on the fact that GNU makes up a very small part of the current user-land ecosystem. It seems to me that the only reason to keep GNU in the GNU/Linux title is for historical purposes, but even then I wouldn't argue for that. Why is GNU worthy of being included when referring to a Linux system in 2020? Linux, as I know it, seems to be pretty distinct from what it was before my time.

I use Gnome every single day. It's a pretty substantial part of the user experience.

I don’t - and yet I work on the same OS, writing the same code and scripts using the same tools (clang, bazel, python).

Gnome is not a defining part of a modern linux system, it is just one choice of many DEs. And a large fraction of Linux systems don’t run any DE at all.

All the servers I interact with on a daily basis are certainly not running Gnome. So desktops running the Linux kernel are GNU\Linux but servers running the Linux kernel are just...Linux?

That's funny, I have a machine over here that's running Debian with musl and busybox.

I think people are way too worried about who gets credit. If rms wanted the recognition that bad, he should have finished Hurd. Also, who started say XFree86 or X.org? I have no idea. But their software is probably a lot more important to a lot of users than gcc or even glibc is.

My comment was not about giving credit. The point is that if you know that the system is GNU, you know what software it is supposed to run, and that does not mean that it can not be compatible if it is not GNU. We can probably also use POSIX (btw, the name for the standard was suggested by RMS [1]) as the lowest common denominator, but would that also include Android?

[1] https://stallman.org/articles/posix.html

More accurate to call it “systemd/Linux” nowadays

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