Taken from the CompTIA IT Fundamentals Exam Guide book (2nd edition, published 2021). I’m not sure if they fixed this in newer versions, if at all.
Taken from the CompTIA IT Fundamentals Exam Guide book (2nd edition, published 2021). I’m not sure if they fixed this in newer versions, if at all.
The whole concept of claiming that GNU is the actual OS never made much sense to me. Like yeah, glibc and coreutils are very major components, but so is the init system, and the package manager, and the WM, and the DE… I don’t really understand why RMS draws the line at GNU arbitrarily other than to stroke his own ego. Following his underlying logic, shouldn’t I call my system Plasma/KWin/pacman/systemd/GNU/Linux?
None of this is directed at you btw, it’s just something that always springs to mind for me whenever this topic comes up.
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Here’s a link to the book:
Free Software, Free Society, Third Edition - Richard M. Stallman, 2015 (PDF)
I was preparing to search for it and your comment ! Thanks lol
GNU is a project whose goal is to create a free operating system.
Way back in the dark ages when commercial UNIX was relevant, it was common to install various GNU utilities to get a better user experience or get things like a C compiler without having to pay tons of money for it.
The kernel part of the project didn’t work out, so the de facto purpose of the GNU project morphed into creating better utilities and libraries for other operating systems.
When the Linux kernel came around, the GNU software was the base of system. That’s why RMS insists on the GNU/Linux thing.
Things like the window system and desktop environment aren’t really considered part of the OS by folks like RMS (and me, for that matter). It’s probably an age thing - used to be there was a “core” system and various add-ons. The core system is the OS in our world view.