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I can't quite tell if you're being cheeky

> we don’t have a word for ... the ... distribution

> Until we have a ... word for the ... shell

distribution/distro and shell are exactly the words we have for these things

But OS sounds more impressive/important, so it's a lot more prevalent.

Microsoft hasn't really used that nomenclature since NT took over all their operating systems. Windows shell+kernel = OS. MacOS = shell+kernel = OS.

It's really the unix/linux world that stuck hard with these being separate things.

Exactly. The windows operating system isn’t just the nt kernel. It’s also all the UI that comes out of the box, that sits on top of that kernel. What is iOS? An operating system. What kind of software is springboard? It’s part of iOS. Part of the operating system.

An operating system is a lot more than just the kernel.

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