Iván Ávalos 🇲🇽 @avalos@cybre.space

“When you hear, ‘oh, you can't make change happen because it's just you against the world.’ It's not, really, and if it's me against the world, I feel like I have the power.” – Michelle Macías, 2020.

https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=Q0i9zxZXwwE

I think I'm getting old. I'm slowly starting to appreciate more stability and reliability in programs over major UI changes every week. I prefer apps not to change visually for decades, but to work well and be efficient; than having pretty apps that consume tons of RAM and change their UI/UX frequently.

Firefox's Proton UI redesign is turning out too well, in my opinion.

Thoughts?

And in case I want to refer to systems with a lot of GNU components, regardless of the kernel they run on, saying GNU* would not be a bad idea. :D

If my project depends on both the Linux kernel and several GNU components, I will use the term GNU/Linux to refer to the platforms it supports. And if a certain distro is officially called GNU/Linux or I know it contains a lot of GNU software and also has philosophical ideals similar to those of the GNU project, I will give preference to GNU/Linux.

Otherwise, I will use *Linux to refer to Linux-based systems in general.

Isn't that fair enough?

Besides, using the term "*Linux" is very similar to *BSD or *nix, so it's not very alien, I guess. From now on, I guess I'll be using it that term instead of saying just "Linux" when referring to Linux-based systems in general. :D

Taking that into account, saying Debian GNU/Linux rather than Debian Linux would be correct, because that's the official name. Besides, Debian probably includes more GNU software than other *Linux distros, so using the term GNU/Linux is less inaccurate compared to other popular *Linux systems with less GNU components.

If a program supports most of the popular Linux systems regardless of its non-kernel components, wouldn't calling it *Linux (notice the asterisk) make more sense?

That would make it more clear that it requires at least some user-land on top of the Linux kernel in order to run. Linux systems such as Debian GNU/Linux, Alpine Linux, etc… would be supported by the program.

On the other hand, if you're referring to a specific Linux system, I believe it is more accurate to use the official name of the distro rather than saying only "Linux". For example, Linux is not an operating system, but Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, Manjaro and Alpine Linux are. If your project relies heavily on some specific distro, then you should use the name of the distro instead of "Linux".