All right. I write and have written a bit about enterprise distros, but because all 3 of the main vendors are just remarkably unhelpful -- I think more from sheer incompetence than malice -- I do not look at them much. It is not very germane to what I do: no competent finance director would base their choice of enterprise OS on reviews in the Register. :-)

I don't know enough to even dispute the timing, so I will let it go.

But the core point here is that Linux has no kernel-integrated GUI, so it is possible to rip and replace it.

Whereas in the comments on my obit for Dr Tim King...

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-ami...

... there are people discussing how it was impossible to completely disable the GUI in AmigaOS 1... it fired up with a CLI in a window because the windowing system is in the ROM. King used it to replace terminal sessions in TRIPOS, if I understand it correctly.

(I was using a Sinclair ZX Spectrum back then myself, and after a while on an Amstrad PCW, moved to an Acorn Archimedes. When AmigaOS 1.x was current, an Amiga cost as much as a small car in the UK, and I had just gone to university and could not afford a bicycle let alone a car.)

Although they were written by different teams, you could no more disable the Amiga's GUI than you could boot a Mac Plus into text mode: it didn't have a text mode to boot into. The GUI was an integral core part of the OS.

AmigaOS was better structured, with kernel, multitasking layer, and GUI layer... but they were still one inextricable whole.

This is the reverse of Unix, including Linux, which is a 1960s minicomputer OS design. Its inextricable core concepts are dumb terminals on serial ports, and a filesystem, and it barely has any built in idea of "networking" or "a GUI" -- they are bolted on extras that came a decade or 2 later.

You can boot any Linux into single-user mode with no networking and no GUI.