With that recent post about chrome os not counting as a distro of linux. It does bring a good question, what is a distro of linux?
If Linux is just a kernel then android and chrome os are Linux. Bur no really considers android a distro of linux. So linux is more then a kernel.
KDE say that neon is not a distro but doesn’t really why neon is not but kubuntu is.
If it distributes Linux, it’s a distro. Thus ChromeOS, Android, Windows are all Linux distros.
If you have a different definition, best you can do with it is go brighten up some lawyer’s day, I guess.
Ah the most popular distro Windows
Windows
Uhhh, well I’d say it’s more like a hypervisor if we’re really pushing it with WSL
Windows distributes Linux, through its repositories, ergo Windows a Linux distribution.
What does it do with it then – acts as a hypervisor or sings its source aloud backwards – is an orthogonal question.
Does Android really even use the Linux Kernel anymore? I thought they forked it about 15 years ago and at this point it has diverged so much its not even really the Linux kernel anymore.
No, it absolutely uses a Linux kernel.
My understanding is that is has to have a certain level of the GNU core utilities in combination with the Kernel but yeah not really, it’s hard to define, maybe the use of a package manager? Definitely nothing to do with GUI, probably a philosophy in mind, not sure at all to be honest.
It is hard. We had Chimera Linux posted here yesterday, which has no GNU code at all. None of the early Linux distributions had package managers. The best I can tell, “pms” (package management system) written for Bogus Linux in 1993 was the earliest, but package management didn’t hit the mainstream until at least 1995. Slackware didn’t get a package manager until the mid-2000s. But we still all consider them distributions. (Right?)
a certain level of the GNU core utilities
Wouldn’t that make Alpine, or OpenWRT, not a distro?
