GNU/Linux naming controversy: Your opinions please.

[KDEandGnomeFan]

I was reading the Wikipedia page on GNU/Linux naming controversy and I tend to agree with Linus Torvalds in this quote.

Well, I think it's justified, but it's justified if you actually make a GNU distribution of Linux ... the same way that I think that "Red Hat Linux" is fine, or "SuSE Linux" or "Debian Linux", because if you actually make your own distribution of Linux, you get to name the thing, but calling Linux in general "GNU Linux" I think is just ridiculous.
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And "Debian Linux" is "Debian GNU/Linux", I respect that term because I don't mind what others call it, even if I don't call it that, if I didn't, it would be violating the basic freedoms, its about free software as in freedom after all right. So I think that neither "Linux" nor "GNU" is an OS. GNU is a collection of software and Linux is a kernel. GNU/Linux would suggest that the OS does not comprise anything other than GNU software or the Linux kernel. But to sum it up, I just call it Linux, I have nothing particularly against other names, though.

 

[Mitt Green]

It depends on the particular distribution. If it's based upon Coreutils and, more importantly, glibc, then you can call it GNU/Linux. For example, Alpine uses BusyBox and musl, OpenWrt, much like Alpine, uses BusyBox and musl, Puppy uses BusyBox but glibc. Android is another example, with Bionic libc, Toybox and mksh. stali (static linux), a proposed (WOP) distribution made by suckless, uses musl, and sbase (base userland), ubase (Linux utilities, much like util-linux), sinit (an init system), smdev (it manages device nodes), and many other programmes, created by the same team. If systemd team will create base userland or merge it into systemd, we will call it systemd/Linux. Also, if you refer to the whole world of distributions, Linux, in my opinion, is more acceptable, because of the examples given above.

 

[atanere]

I kind of liked RMS's early suggestion: Lignux. But it didn't catch on. Oh well.

Cheers!