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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

The difference between Win32 and Linux is that the latter didn't realize an operating system is more than a kernel and a number of libraries and systems glued together, but is, indeed, a stable ABI (even for kernel modules -- so old drivers will be usable forever), a default, unique and stable API for user interface, audio, ..., and so forth. Linux failed completely not technologically, but to understand what an OS is from the POV of a product.

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Linux didn't aim to be an OS in the consumer sense (it is entirely an OS in an academic sense - in scientific literature OS == kernel, nothing else).The "consumer" OS is GNU/Linux or Android/Linux.

There really isn't that much GNU on a modern Linux system, proportionately.

Exactly, Gnome/Linux or KDE/Linux would make a lot more sense.

Except that it can be both and more: you can have Gnome, KDE, and other DEs and libraries installed and use app based on all of them simultaneously.

Sure, although every distro has a default.

systemd/Linux maybe? Lots of things are more significant than GNU, either way.

Both are being baked

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gnomeos

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=kdelinux

The question is if either will catch any interest and if so, what will happen to regular distributions.

> it is entirely an OS in an academic sense - in scientific literature OS == kernel, nothing else

No, the academic literature makes the difference between the kernel and the OS as a whole. The OS is meant to provide hardware abstractions to both developers and the user. The Linux world shrugged and said 'okay, this is just the kernel for us, everyone else be damned'. In this view Linux is the complete outlier, because every other commercial OS comes with a full suite of user-mode libraries and applications.

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