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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop calling Android Linux just because it shares the Linux kernel? Obviously the author was referring to a GNU/Linux distro.

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No, because it is Linux. The correct solution is to refer to a particular distribution, as many of them make significantly different decisions.

Android is not just linux. Linux is just the kernel, and everything else running on it has nothing to do with Linux and that's the majority of Android user software and interface.

It's just like saying "this human and this bacteria are the same, they have a DNA with the same chemical structure !".

My point was not 'call all distributions Linux'. I'm saying that disqualifying Android but keeping Debian is incorrect. Debian, Android, Ubuntu. They are just different Linux distributions.

I think we should stop calling "all the distros" simply "Linux". There is an Ubuntu operating system and a Fedora operating system. They might short most of the code, but you cannot expect to run programs compiled for to run unmodified on the other.

Well, yes, but it's certainly way fairer to put Fedora and Ubuntu under the same umbrella than putting Ubuntu and Android in the same basket. GNU/Linux distros have tons of things in common, and you can often use passthrough systems to run packages from one distro on another (not that I'd recommend that).

For this purpose, "Linux" is still too general even when restricting ourself to traditional GNU/Linux distributions. The answer may depend on which exact services a specific distribution runs by default, as well as kernel configuration.

I'd be interested to see the answer for an out of the box Ubuntu distribution (latest stable version), as well as the answer for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to cover the "leading brands" for the consumer and business markets.

Well, the kernel does device, process and memory management and that is a likely culprit when looking into power usage.

Partly. You can see that the memory consumption and the CPU consumption of various GNU/Linux distros can vary enormously even with the same kernel.

Android is Linux, just not desktop Linux. A line which is blurring, with Ubuntu on phones and Android on laptops.

Desktop Linux is not about the hardware you run it on. Android on laptops is still Android, it's not blurring the line of a GNU/Linux distro at all.

why not? besides having a LINUX kernel, it runs a lot of GNU linux programs such as GNU coreutils...

That's not true, the Android userland is not GNU. It's probably possible to compile some of the GNU tools to work with the bionic libc but it's not the default userland.

I think it's fair to say Android is running on Linux, it's just not GNU/Linux.

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