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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

A little while ago I realized with a start that it's been years since I've heard anyone angrily insist on calling it "GNU/Linux", when that was constant background noise during the Slashdot era. One of those old fights that just faded away, I guess.

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Oh yeah, I got to meet Stallman at a book signing when I was like 17, and like an idiot happened to wear a "Linux" shirt.

I genuinely hadn't thought of this point of contention beforehand, but oof he did not care for that.

Did you tell him you were a fan of just the kernel, not the userland?

I got him to imply I was being cheap!

A lot of the userland _isn't_ GNU any more, people use a lot of alternatives for once much more dominant GNU tools, and people use a lot more commandline tools which have no relation to GNU. Systemd took over and for containers there's no init. Plenty of alternative libc implementations as well.

GNU is nowhere near as dominant in the non-kernel code that people run any longer.

And a lot of the GNU zealots who were particularly interested in getting credit with naming got old.

Its more that it ceased to be true: you can build a "nognu" Linux now, with LLVM as the system compiler, and musl/libc++ instead of glibc/libstdc++.

https://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/amd64/autobuilds/curre...

Or use Chimera Linux.

That's true. I find myself still saying GNU/Linux where it's relevant (e.g. when referring to the userland, or a compatible userland) but it's not as contentious as it used to be, which is a nice breath.

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