I can use GNU bash on NetBSD with no other GNU software installed. I can install GNU coreutils on Alpine Linux (complete with musl libc instead of glibc). In fact, it's possible to just install a single part of GNU coreutils but not the rest - ex. Alpine packages
just sha512sum as
https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/contents?branch=edge&name=coreu... (not sure why). I don't think I've seen it done, but you
could build a Linux distro that used glibc and gcc but no other GNU software (busybox coreutils and ksh shell, say). GNU has their own kernel, but is predominantly used on other OSs. They want to build all the pieces, but you can opt in or out of
all of them, and they're all portable. In contrast, if you want to use, say, run0, you
must run systemd as PID 1, you
must use journald, and the whole stack only runs on Linux. So yeah, that is actually different.