The word they're looking for is "GNU".
It's nonsense to argue that Ubuntu and Fedora are "Linux" and Android is not. It is not nonsense to want to put Ubuntu and Fedora in the same bucket, which does not contain Android or Alpine. That bucket is GNU.
When we use the words to mean what they are (not using Linux to mean software other than Linux) the point that the author is trying to make becomes obvious.
It's basically "Linux proper" (whether is the GNU libc/musl + GNU/whatever userland breakdown) vs "Linux that's a backend for Google's ChromeOS GUI and for which Google could replace the Linux part and noone will be any wiser". Rare or not, the exotic combination I mentioned would still qualify.
Besides, I'm pretty sure ChromeOS still has the whole GNU userland installed.
And while being pedantic about this, they still called Linux a Unix (which it's not) while ignoring the commercial unixes because they're dead (which, as much as I'd like it to be true, it's not in the case of MacOS).
The person who wrote this article was dishonest or ignorant in so many levels.
Uhhhhhhh, on what basis ? The only arguments I can see for this would be either of:
- Pedantry, as technically the Linux kernel itself isn't UNIX certified by the Open Group, who owns the trademark - though multiple distributions have been certified to past standards, with no meaningful changes necessary. As an additional note, if you want to only count implementations conforming to the latest standard as being "real UNIX", then AIX is literally the only UNIX in existence.
- Purity, as Linux doesn't directly use any of the original code from AT&T-created UNIX OSes. But by that standard, it seems like modern BSDs wouldn't qualify as "UNIX", given that all of the AT&T code was stripped out a long time ago, and MacOS would qualify even less given it uses a non-AT&T kernel and only a few parts of some BSDs in the userland. Also, if including AT&T-produced code suffices to be "UNIX" then I must ask whether a Linux distribution that comes with ksh qualifies (...or even if Windows with UWIN or Cygwin+ksh qualifies). Generally though, the argument just reeks of ancestor worship to me.
...and neither of them are satisfactory to me.
Linux is just one piece, and also quite old; by your logic we should really just call it a GNU system. In fact, from a user perspective, a GNU/HURD or Debian GNU/kFreeBSD system far more closely resembles what you're calling Linux than, say, Android which literally uses the Linux kernel.