“Linux” doesn’t exist
No matter how hard people try, “Linux” doesn’t exist in the true sense. It’s a kernel, yeah, but mostly a concept, a buzzword. I used to say GNU/Linux, but even that doesn’t mean much, so now I’m just using quotes around the word.
People expect one thing and they get another, all because “Linux” means different things to different people - think of the many distros for instance. Most software is multiplatform anyway, a direct consequence of being free software. So why not call it that or be specific and name your distro if that’s really important. My guess is, it’s the applications that matter. And applications don’t care much about the OS they run on nowadays.
Inspired by a message on the MLUG mailing list.
I agree that “Linux” isn’t a single OS as such, but rather as a Meta OS. It’s true that each distribution has it’s own way of doing things, but it’s also true that there is more overlap between distros then there is difference. I myself am a Gentoo user, but I’ve never come across a distro that wasn’t transparently usable by me.
The differences between distros generally amounts to one or more of the following: it’s installer, it’s startup scripts, it’s package management system, it’s default setup, it’s library version numbers, and it’s file locations. This is quite a lot of difference, however, despite this, I don’t always refer to my distro because there are way more similarities than differences between distro’s. GCC is GCC, Gnome is Gnome, KDE is KDE, Bash is Bash, the Kernel is the Kernel, Netfilter is Netfilter… and what you can do in one distro you can generally do in all distros. But then again, outside of Kernel stuff, the same overlap exists with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD which are different OSs so…
I guess the choice of distro makes a big difference to a new Linux user, and where they might have a positive user experience with Ubuntu, they would probably have a negative experience with Gentoo… Oh well enough rambling…
Comment by Matthew — 2007/01/24 @ 11:18