Why Linux is portrayed as a Penguin?
The penguin’s name is “Tux” and he’s the official Linux mascot.
I think Linus Torvalds picked it a long time ago, he said he wanted something that was non-threatening, so hence the penguin lol.
The debate about Linux vs GNU/Linux imo, is one of the stupidest and pedantic debates I’ve ever heard. Maybe it mattered 30+ years ago when things were much less developed and only hardcore nerds and programmers used it, but now days it’s only important to grognards and neckbeards.
Hot take, but it’s like those pretentious music enthusiasts that will argue about what precise genre an artist fits into. “I would say they are post-progressive indie skitzo-pop. No way! They are clearly more neo-grunge sca-punk with post-rock elements” who cares?? Have your ultra-precise categories in your personal music collection all you want, but acting like it’s based on some hardcore objective truths of the universe is stupid.
Nobody is confused when I say I run Linux as my OS. Actually, people do get confused but it’s not because of GNU/Linux, it’s because they haven’t ever heard of Linux and thought that Windows and MacOS were the only 2 OSes for computers.
If somebody genuinely pulled an “um, actually” on me for saying Linux vs GNU/Linux, I would scream laugh loudly and then change the subject.
Yeah, but should you pronounce it Gee-en-yoo or Guh-no͞o? Huh? That REALLY tells me where your allegiances lay.
Ñu
Nü
Nee!
We demand a shrubbery!
Ño.
I pronounce it GNU
I honestly didn’t know people pronounced it any other way than gee-en-you. It’s in all caps, so I figured you said each letter.
Now that I think more about it though, I don’t know why I assumed that. I don’t say AWOL as ay-doubleyou-oh-el. I don’t say SNAFU as es-en-ay-ef-you.
I’m just going to call it the OS for yaks from now on and never think about it again.
This is how I am with “GUI”…I just call it Gee-you-eye. I finally went to a class on the subject for real and some people were calling it a “Gooey”…and I…no. Just fucking no. It’s not a “Gooey”.
I had textbooks in college (25 years ago) that always had little blurbs about the acronyms and their pronunciation. GUI, we were instructed, was pronounced gooey. WYSIWYG is wiz-ee-wig, etc. It was on tests IIRC.
It is guh-new and guh-nome. Just rolls off the tongue like normal conversation.
Like much of my early language skills, I learned it from Sesame Street:
“Remember: No g-news is good g-news with Gary Gnu!” 😛You mean you don’t pronounce it “GNU’s Not Unix” to all of your compatriots?
Holy smokes. 1000x this. You want Linux to be popular, stop gatekeeping it and being a hipster. OSX is a great example of how to make a Unix like OS popular with NORMAL people.
Grandma doesn’t care what kernel she’s running and … Hint hint, neither do I. I just want my computer to work and be easy to maintain.
I run Ubuntu, not because it’s the best, but became it just works. I might swap to Mint or PopOS, but that takes time out of my life which I’d rather spend coding or working out.
You want Linux to win on the desktop, you have to get manufacturers to make it the default, and good luck getting Dell or HP to change.
Heck most folks don’t even own a computer now a days.
Be happy Android won on mobile and Linux won on servers. ❤️
HP released the Dev One laptop running Linux once.
Niiiice
Um actually it’s called ska, not sca
I was about to draw out nukes over it.
I wonder how far back Richard Stallman set the free software movement by being absolutely cock slamming terrible at naming things. “I’m going to name my operating system after the sound my throat makes while swallowing a whole goldfish.”
If that bothers you, you should read the GNU FAQ page… About half of it consists of variations on “but why GNU/Linux”, including my personal favorite where they discuss why it’s not GNU Linux: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#whyslash and how you need to pronounce the slash: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#pronounce
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That makes sense
Here we go. …
Linux is the kernel.
Gnu refers to the userland tools.
Many say gnu no longer really applies as the userland tools are provided by more than GNU’s specific set.
I understand why Stallman wanted us to say GNU/Linux, because his organization needs money and wants its name out there, but that’s simply not how things get named in the real world.
First, GNU was always a mouthful. It’s always been intentionally pronounced differently from the animal. People prefer names that are not confusing and that don’t sound strange.
Second, we don’t do the same thing for other operating systems. If you’re an illustrator, you don’t say that you work on Adobe/Windows or whatever.
Third, GNU/Linux adds nothing interesting over simply “Linux”. And in fact, there have been distributions where they avoid GNU tooling due. Everybody still recognizes these as Linux.
For your second point, do you say that you use Adobe or Windows?
Or how about if I said I made this cool image using Linux? More likely I’d say I used GIMP or ImageMagick or some specific command line tool.
Linux is just the kernel. It’s an amazing kernel, but it’s only half the story. The tools on top of it are just as important as the kernel. That’s the point of saying GNU/Linux is to call out the other half of the whole experience.
The reason GNU/Linux isn’t popular to say is that it doesn’t provide any real information. “I run Linux” and “I run GNU/Linux” doesn’t really tell you anything. “I run Debian”, “I run Fedora”, “I run Arch BTW”, those all tell you something different.
I can’t speak to the OS landscape when Linux was released. Maybe saying that you ran GNU/Minix or Bell/Unix or whatever combinations might have existed would have made sense. However at this point it doesn’t.
For your second point, do you say that you use Adobe or Windows?
I mean, you already know the answer to that. The point is that you don’t have to give the entire context of your computing environment every time you mention some product you use.
Linux is just the kernel.
It’s not only the kernel. It is also the name that people have settled on for differentiating the computer running the Linux kernel from a computer running Windows.
I always pronounced it guh-new as in “Gary Gnu”.
How is it supposed to be pronounced?
I was contrasting it with the animal “gnu”, otherwise known as the wildebeest, which is pronounced more similar to the word “new”. I suspect more people know the animal gnu than know the organization GNU.
I think you’re right. I think some people say G-N-U.
same one’s that say “ess queue elle” when they mean squirrel probably.
squirrel
What the actual f? There is no “r”. In my home country, we say it “squeal”.
G-N-U, like spelling it out?
I think there a bunch of mispronunciations. OP seems to be referring to the “new” mispronounciation, while I was referring to the spelling out mispronunciation.
Agreed. Names don’t work that way. Should we just append any remotely relevant info to the name? “I use Arch/Systemd/Gnu/Linux-AMD 5 7700X, webcam connected, 2000 dpi mouse BTW”
Yea totally with you there.
Let me interject for a moment …
“I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!”
No, Richard, it’s ‘Linux’, not ‘GNU/Linux’. The most important contributions that the FSF made to Linux were the creation of the GPL and the GCC compiler. Those are fine and inspired products. GCC is a monumental achievement and has earned you, RMS, and the Free Software Foundation countless kudos and much appreciation. Following are some reasons for you to mull over, including some already answered in your FAQ. One guy, Linus Torvalds, used GCC to make his operating system (yes, Linux is an OS – more on this later). He named it ‘Linux’ with a little help from his friends. Why doesn’t he call it GNU/Linux? Because he wrote it, with more help from his friends, not you. You named your stuff, I named my stuff – including the software I wrote using GCC – and Linus named his stuff. The proper name is Linux because Linus Torvalds says so. Linus has spoken. Accept his authority. To do otherwise is to become a nag. You don’t want to be known as a nag, do you? (An operating system) != (a distribution). Linux is an operating system. By my definition, an operating system is that software which provides and limits access to hardware resources on a computer. That definition applies whereever you see Linux in use. However, Linux is usually distributed with a collection of utilities and applications to make it easily configurable as a desktop system, a server, a development box, or a graphics workstation, or whatever the user needs. In such a configuration, we have a Linux (based) distribution. Therein lies your strongest argument for the unwieldy title ‘GNU/Linux’ (when said bundled software is largely from the FSF). Go bug the distribution makers on that one. Take your beef to Red Hat, Mandrake, and Slackware. At least there you have an argument. Linux alone is an operating system that can be used in various applications without any GNU software whatsoever. Embedded applications come to mind as an obvious example. Next, even if we limit the GNU/Linux title to the GNU-based Linux distributions, we run into another obvious problem. XFree86 may well be more important to a particular Linux installation than the sum of all the GNU contributions. More properly, shouldn’t the distribution be called XFree86/Linux? Or, at a minimum, XFree86/GNU/Linux? Of course, it would be rather arbitrary to draw the line there when many other fine contributions go unlisted. Yes, I know you’ve heard this one before. Get used to it. You’ll keep hearing it until you can cleanly counter it. You seem to like the lines-of-code metric. There are many lines of GNU code in a typical Linux distribution. You seem to suggest that (more LOC) == (more important). However, I submit to you that raw LOC numbers do not directly correlate with importance. I would suggest that clock cycles spent on code is a better metric. For example, if my system spends 90% of its time executing XFree86 code, XFree86 is probably the single most important collection of code on my system. Even if I loaded ten times as many lines of useless bloatware on my system and I never excuted that bloatware, it certainly isn’t more important code than XFree86. Obviously, this metric isn’t perfect either, but LOC really, really sucks. Please refrain from using it ever again in supporting any argument. Last, I’d like to point out that we Linux and GNU users shouldn’t be fighting among ourselves over naming other people’s software. But what the heck, I’m in a bad mood now. I think I’m feeling sufficiently obnoxious to make the point that GCC is so very famous and, yes, so very useful only because Linux was developed. In a show of proper respect and gratitude, shouldn’t you and everyone refer to GCC as ‘the Linux compiler’? Or at least, ‘Linux GCC’? Seriously, where would your masterpiece be without Linux? Languishing with the HURD? If there is a moral buried in this rant, maybe it is this: Be grateful for your abilities and your incredible success and your considerable fame. Continue to use that success and fame for good, not evil. Also, be especially grateful for Linux’ huge contribution to that success. You, RMS, the Free Software Foundation, and GNU software have reached their current high profiles largely on the back of Linux. You have changed the world. Now, go forth and don’t be a nag. permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply
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Eww, is this a copy pasta from that defunct pedophile website?
I like when it says “permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply”, so deep!
mmm…gnu/pasta. delicious
You mean GNU/Linux/pasta, gotta have that clarification in there.
You’re denying tomato’s important components. I would appreciate it if you called it “Tomato Sauce/GNU/Linux/Pasta” naturally Tomato should come first as it sits on top of everything else, and in sheer amount of color, is more visible.
Love it lol
KDE/Linux
AwesomeWM/Linux
https://i.imgur.com/vwQ1VFC.png
FFS lol, why don’t we skip the pedantry and just call it Gary already
Why Linux is portrayed as a Penguin?
In the uses section, it mentions Tux being shown at the top of the boot sequence for Gentoo.
It’s kinda funny because I’ve been using Gentoo for almost 4 years and never knew that there was one Tux per CPU core until I read this article. That’s fun!
Just thought it put out the same number on every system I guess, haha!
I thought it had to do with screen width
BTW/Arch
Arch/BTW
❤️
Are those your pronouns?
they are now!
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It’s not unusual to see people talking about android users being Linux users “because android is Linux too” clearly not understanding the difference between Linux the OS, i.e. GNU/Linux, and Linux the kernel. So it’s useful when you have to make such a distinction.
Exactly. When I say I want a Linux phone all I get are Android options. What I want is a GNU/Linux phone that I can run full Linux distros on.
Alpine or PostmarketOS works for older stuff. Some others will run Ubuntu as well.
Instead of “Linux on [phone]” try using Debian/Ubuntu or one of the mobile-targeting distros as a keyword
Alpine
Alpine is also arguably not “GNU/Linux”, as it doesn’t use GNU Core Utils or glibc. But I don’t know anyone who would suggest that Alpine isn’t “proper Linux”.
As you point out, what you want is a phone you can run “full Linux distros” on. Ask for that. That request is completely clear and well defined. What does GNU have to do with it?
The Android question is easily clarified by simply pointing out the difference between a Linux distribution and the Linux kernel and stressing the self-evident fact that when people say “Linux” without clarification that they are talking about Linux distros.
Clarity can be achieved easily by using the term Linux kernel when that is what you mean. It is not necessary to introduce the term GNU / Linux to refer to Linux distributions. Not only is it not necessary but it is actually a really poor term for that as I explain elsewhere. Instead of bringing clarity, the term GNU / Linux brings more complexity and confusion. It also introduces politics which is a never a good idea when you are trying to explain a technical distinction.
Android uses the Linux kernel of course but Android as an operating system is not a Linux distribution in the way that 99% people will understand that term. It is not “Linux”. The same is true of ChromeOS.
Even Windows ships with the Linux kernel these days. Is it “Linux”?
The distinction is between talking about Linux distributions and the Linux kernel. By far the most common understanding that saying just “Linux” refers to a Linux distribution or to the ecosystem of distributions collectively. When people want to talk just about the kernel they say so—they say Linux kernel.
The kind of people that want to claim Android is a Linux because it uses the Linux kernel or not going to be convinced by the GNU / Linux argument. They are going the other direction by wanting to over-emphasize the Linux label.
When I talk about Linux, it means the collections of operating systems that run the same universe of software and file systems: X, Wayland, Pipewire, Mesa, Proton, Docker, Kubernetes, Ext4, Btrfs, GNOME, KDE, POSIX, and all the applications that run on top of those. Not even closely related systems like FreeBSD run that same set of software because “Linux” systems are distinct. The term is a meaningful, accurate, and useful descriptor of a complex software ecosystem.
Does GNU / Linux identify the same ecosystem as above? No. Alpine Linux is one of the most common Linux distros used with Docker and Kubernetes. Alpine is a full and proper Linux by my definition. It cannot be properly described as GNU / Linux because it does not use the GNU C library or Core Utils. Void Linux, and increasingly popular distro, is similar. Chimera Linux, a new but really interesting distro is certainly a Linux. Tens of thousands of applications that we would expect to work on Linux will work on it including the deeply Linux specific stuff like Podman. However Chimera Linux does not leverage or depend on GNU software at all. It is Linux but most certainly not GNU / Linux.
Please talk more about Free Software ( if that is what you want to support ) or Open Source ( if you are about the software more than “user freedom” ). Linux is Free Software and the popularity of Linux and the massive universe of software and hardware support it enjoys are a huge achievement. Celebrate that achievement but stop trying to stamp the GNU brand on it. The GNU Project represents a tiny fraction of the universe of Free Software and of the Linux ecosystem. For most people, the term GNU / Linux is confusing, off-putting, and inaccurate. If we want the success of Free Software and the Linux ecosystem to continue, then continuing to promote the values and benefits of “Linux” will help. Promoting the term GNU / Linux is putting the ego of the GNU Project ( and its founder ) above the success of the software. Is that what we want?
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Unfortunately for them this means that 99.99% of the Linux distributions out there do not qualify as >GNU/Linux, even the ones like Debian, Red Hat, or Ubuntu that did adopt the GNU/Linux name >scheme, because they all host, promote, or allow users access to non-free software in some way.
You are totally confused. In words of R. Stallman:
“The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux”.
“Today there are many different variants of the GNU/Linux system (often called “distros”). Most of them include nonfree programs”.
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I recently found myself forced to give a shit, when one of our projects started doing weird shit after switching to an Alpine-based docker image.
Can you elaborate? I’m aware alpine uses non-GNU stuff like musl & busybox. But overall, they’re not too far off.
It was a dependency resolution issue. Npm couldn’t install one of the packages without some package.json gymnastics, and those same gymnastics somehow fucked with our debian based images that we use for development. I can’t say much more because I honestly don’t know what exactly happened. I just diagnosed the issue and forwarded it to our resident node guru, who took it from there.
I really don’t care what ppl call it, I call it “Linux”, because saying “GNU/Linux” is really annoying. Also, I like Alpine so yeah I can say that I use “Linux”.
What’s better is GNU. IDGAF if the kernel is Linux or HURD as long as my hardware works, but I do care about preferring copyleft-licensed stuff to permissively-licensed stuff.
Can I ask why you prefer copyleft? I’m a big fan of permissive stuff.
Copyleft ensures that fixes, improvements, etc make it back into the main project. Permissive stuff allows capitalist behemoths to take your shit and run. The latter is personal preference. Some people care that their work is being passed onto others.
Adding to your reasons, I think copyleft is great because it prevents the code from being incorporated into proprietary anything. If you shitstains want to use my code while stripping the freedoms I intended it to have, fuck you!
Alternative view:
Copyleft prevents corporations from contributing their stuff and it turns out corporations produce more useful Open Source software than political activists do.
Clang / LLVM is a good example of a permissive body of work that has attracted heavy investment from a number of corporate players that collaborate on its development out of their shared vested interest ( not the threat of legal action ). Despite starting literally decades after GCC, Clang has largely caught up and even surpassed it in some ways. This is especially true when you consider Rust.
Some of the largest, longest lived, and important components in the free software world are MIT licensed. Consider X.org which is now being replaced by Wayland ( also MIT ).
Sure, permissive licenses stop “your” contributions from being used by evil corporations. They also increase the chances that you get to use “their” contributions.
Both. Richard and Linux paved the way for what all FOSS and the world currently is
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux_(mascot)
TIL, Linus Torvalds just likes penguins.
Yeah, he’s just based like that
Systemd/Linux
Ain’t that the sad truth. 😂
Just go with whatever software distribution you use.
Gun/Linux 🔫
Neither it’s GNU^Linux (read: GNU to the power of Linux)
GNU/Linux is the more technically accurate term, but in practice, most people say “Linux” so that others know what they’re talking about.
And the reason for Tux is because Linus Torvalds was once bitten by a penguin.
It’s not more accurate with distros like gokrazy, alpine, or chimera which aren’t necessarily based on GNU software (the last of which specifically advertises itself as „non-gnu Linux”)
Most people don’t use them. And nobody is calling them GNU/