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Yes, you need to install Emacs. It is probably available from whatever package manager your system uses.

I prefer Doom (https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs) to Spacemacs. However I haven't looked at Spacemacs for many years; perhaps it's now on par with Doom.

It's a fair point IMO. Especially with something like Spacemacs, which really presents a fairly radical different experience to vanilla. I'm not sure anything is really gained by NOT including their own Emacs binary. I guess Emacs doesn't break external code that often, so it might not be a huge issue, but I can't imagine there is never a version mismatch that leads to unnecessary user confusion.

An OS distribution is a whole OS because you need an OS. An Emacs “distribution” (quotes) doesn’t include Emacs because you can already install vanilla Emacs yourself.

Que Emacs is an OS jokes.