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.
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.
Ah the most popular distro Windows
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.
a certain level of the GNU core utilities
Wouldn’t that make Alpine, or OpenWRT, not a distro?
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?)
