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“GNU” was always crappy branding. Nobody wants to read it or say it or explain it. “Linux” sounds cool. So everyone calls the whole system “Linux”.

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More people should be aware of GNU part. I hate to see GNU having substantially less financial support than Linux.

The other reason though, is why does GNU think they are so important compared to some pretty important other system components?

Why isn't it GNU/Linux/SystemD/Mesa/Xorg? Basically every Linux desktop could be described that way.

Basically, if not GNU, Linux would have stayed a hobbyist project or maybe never even happened.

So should we call it Linux/Torvalds? Linux/Torvalds/Stallman?

Heck, if Earth didn’t exist, Linux wouldn’t have happened, so Linux/Earth/Sun/Biology/Torvalds/Stallman/SystemD/Mesa/PulseAudio/Wayland…

GNU nowadays is a tiny part of the desktop. There’s also projects slowly moving to rewrite it in Rust and a more permissive license, other parts are losing importance like GCC losing to Clang, so its relevance is dying over time. Just like the FSF.

Or Linus would have found some other way to have a userspace and we’d still have Linux but with different tools.

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