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Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

GNU is becoming progressively less and less important.

The "killer apps" for Linux have never been GNU. Apache httpd and XFree86/Xorg are by far and above the most popular applications on Linux, and they aren't GNU projects.

Graphically, GNU is at its nadir of influence. Freedesktop.org controls most cross-desktop standards, libraries, and services. GNU's own desktop environment GNOME is no longer nearly as popular as it used to be thanks to GNOME 3 being actively hostile to desktop users (and GNOME has always been part of GNU on paper only -- it's effectively a Red Hat project).

On the platform side, the init system has never been GNU. While the init system has always been a minor part of the OS, this is changing thanks to systemd (also a product of freedesktop.org) getting its hooks into everything on several levels.

Actually, I'd go as far as to say that freedesktop.org has far more influence on the userland than GNU does right now.

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Aren't these all "killer apps" for Linux?

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A canonical example of a killer app is something like Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC, or Halo for the original XBox -- something so compelling as to drive adoption of the host platform. Those are all pretty standard *IX command line utilities, not killer apps.

(They're also the sort of thing that I bet someone has coded in Rust or Go over a few weekends as an exercise, and as such they're probably the EASIEST bit of GNU code to rip out of Linux at this point if you wanted a Linux without GNU.)

> A canonical example of a killer app is something like Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC, or Halo for the original XBox -- something so compelling as to drive adoption of the host platform.

True, and I don't think the listed command-line utilities do that. OTOH, I do think that that presentation hints at the truth -- the "killer apps" that are driving Linux adoption aren't a big flashy end-user-facing 1-2-3 style apps, or even apps in the traditional sense, but lower-level more-technical features/tools that make developing on and for Linux attractive, or make Linux attractive for use in cloud deployments, etc.

In my opinion, the "killer apps" for Linux (aside from the Apache httpd that amyjess mentioned) are:

* A mostly Unix-like OS that runs on available commodity hardware, rather than requiring you to buy a SPARC, Alpha or POWER machine, you can buy a commodity x86 machine and use that instead. Because of economies of scale, commodity hardware is always going to be cheaper.

* Low (really no) licensing cost. The traditional model of scaling was that when your computer wasn't fast enough, you bought a faster computer. Linux's licensing model makes it affordable to scale horizontally -- to have lots of "slow" computers provide the same computing capacity as one big computer. In a "buy a computer and you have to buy my UNIX" world, any savings you can achieve by scaling out instead of up are offset by software licensing costs. Not in a Linux world, though.

They are all readily available on a number of other operating systems.

The single most widely used distro of Linux, Android, does not use XFree86/Xorg. Indeed it uses almost nothing from GNU or freedesktop.org

Android using the Linux kernel doesn't make it a Linux distro any more than Linux using GNU code in its userland makes Linux the GNU operating system. (Or put another way, nobody thinks that iOS is "the most widely used BSD.")

>Android using the Linux kernel doesn't make it a Linux distro any more than...

Um, actually that's exactly what makes it a Linux distro. That's the one defining feature of a Linux distro.

Well, iOS uses the XNU kernel which has Mach as its basis, not BSD. It uses a lot of parts of the FreeBSD kernel, though, but it's definitely not tracking upstream FreeBSD the same way that Android is.

And GCC is losing a lot of ground to Clang/LLVM.

GNU's own desktop environment GNOME

I am pretty sure GNOME is separate from GNU/FSF.

It's officially part of GNU: http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html ctrl-F "gnome"

Also, http://www.gnu.org/software/gnome/ redirects to http://www.gnome.org.

This relationship, however, exists purely on paper. Actual governance is performed by the GNOME Foundation, whose membership consists of all contributors to the project, and most (but not all) funding comes from Red Hat.

Edit: Beaten to the punch. That's what I get when I try to post and code at the same time.

GNOME project, and its products, are the work of the GNOME Foundation [0], not GNU/FSF.

GNU links to GNOME from the name "gnome" within its list of "GNU packages" [1], but GNOME is, and has been for some time, its own separate organization. GNU claims that things it lists as "GNU software" consist of software "released under the auspices of the GNU Project" [2], but that doesn't seem to apply to GNOME in any meaningful sense now, though historically GNOME was a product of the GNU project.

EDITED: to reflect historical relationship noted in cwyers reply.

[0] https://www.gnome.org/

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html

[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#GNUsoftware

Looking at the history:

http://www.gnu.org/press/gnome-1.0.html

> The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the release of GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) 1.0 today at the Linux World Conference. GNOME is an integrated desktop environment designed to run on GNU/Linux systems.

> The Free Software Foundation, a tax-exempt charity formed in 1985, is dedicated to eliminating restrictions of people's right to use, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. It does so by protecting these rights through the GNU General Public License. The aim is to give people the freedom to cooperate with other computer users.

> "GNOME is a flexible GUI (Graphical User's Interface) that combines ease of use and the flexibility and reliability of GNU/Linux. We're very excited about GNOME and what it will mean for the future of GNU/Linux computing" Miguel de Icaza, chief designer of GNOME said earlier.

At one point, the G in GNOME stood for GNU (now GNOME is just a name, not an acronym), and the FSF was active in its maintenance.

My assumption is that the FSF used to be responsible for GNOME's governance before the GNOME Foundation existed, and nobody ever bothered to update the website afterwards.

That it's still listed is either stale, inaccurate data on a webpage or a relationship that only exists on paper, depending on how you look at it.

Oh, and all this just underscores my point that GNU has effectively no presence in the graphical sphere except for a few scattered applications (e.g. GIMP, Emacs).

GNOME is listed under the GNU Project's software page:

http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html

The page http://www.gnu.org/software/gnome/ is a redirect to gnome.org.

GCC and it's ecosystem is a killer app. Without it, you likely wouldn't have had the others[1], including Linux itself.

[1] X existed in the before time, but it was distinctly different than XFree86.

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