Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It
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@scottalanmiller said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
@thwr said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
So Linux is the kernel, obviously. Everything around would be a distro, a flavor.
I like to call them by their name and give a hint about the origin. Like "I'm going to install Fedora, which is a Red Hat based distribution."
Actually, Red Hat is a Fedora-based distro
Yeah, sponsored by Red Hat, to be more precise
Like "I'm going to install Ubuntu, which is a Debian based distribution."
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@thwr said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
@scottalanmiller said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
@thwr said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
So Linux is the kernel, obviously. Everything around would be a distro, a flavor.
I like to call them by their name and give a hint about the origin. Like "I'm going to install Fedora, which is a Red Hat based distribution."
Actually, Red Hat is a Fedora-based distro
Yeah, sponsored by Red Hat, to be more precise
Like "I'm going to install Ubuntu, which is a Debian based distribution."
Right, Fedora, sponsored by Red Hat. Or RHEL, a Fedora-based distro.
Or, Ubuntu, sponsored by Canonical. Ubuntu, a Debian-based distro.
Fedora and Debian are roots, RHEL, CentOS and Ubuntu are derivatives.
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Hmm, what if you take the Linux out of Ubuntu or Android. What are you left with? Maybe that is a question worth answering. What if you took the MSDOS out of Win98? What are you left with?
Will you still have a functional system? Nope. But are you left with so much it is still almost a complete system?
If you take the wheels off a car, or take out the engine, is it still a car?
Food for thought. I can see either direction, but I still lean towards SAMs take.
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@Tim_G said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
Hmm, what if you take the Linux out of Ubuntu or Android. What are you left with?
Ubuntu exists without Linux. Ubuntu on the Windows Kernel was a big deal in 2016.
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@Tim_G said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
What if you took the MSDOS out of Win98? What are you left with?
Windows 98 is a "windowing environment" for DOS. That was the name used at the time. DOS was the OS, Windows 98 is an environment, comparable to KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Cinnamon or similar.
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@Tim_G said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
Will you still have a functional system? Nope. But are you left with so much it is still almost a complete system?
Depends. Windows 98 without DOS is... nothing. But KDE without Linux will still run on FreeBSD or Windows. Ubuntu without Linux can run on Windows. Debian has been ported to other kernels as well. FreeBSD was ported to the Mach kernel, that, along with tons of other work, was the foundation of Mac OSX.
The kernel, the operating system itself and the windowing environments are usually quite separate things. In the Windows world it is licensing that makes this seem less the case. In the Linux and BSD worlds where licensing makes things a lot more flexible we regularly see all of these components move around pretty freely.
Like the underlying OS of FreeBSD, but like the look of KDE? Just install KDE on FreeNAS.
Like BASH syntax but don't want to run Linux, you can put BASH on pretty much anything, including Windows (although that particular one is a big pain.) But a commercial CSH port is available that runs very smoothly.
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@Tim_G said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
If you take the wheels off a car, or take out the engine, is it still a car?
That's not quite the right example, though. If you take the engine (Linux) out of the car (Ubuntu), you don't have a working car. But you can put a different engine (Windows NTKernel) in its place and now you have a working car again that to end users works exactly like it did before, but to a trained high performance driver they will be able to tell that different operations are faster or slower at different times, reboots are more frequent, load handling is different, etc.
It's what happens when you keep switching pieces. If the Nissan 3.5L goes into ten different production vehicles, we don't think of them as all being one car. To the average driver, it being a Quest minivan or a Maxima sedan is all that matters and which engine is under the hood, while maybe interesting, isn't very important. Linux is under the hood and normal users, even normal admins, don't interact with it.
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I'd say you just pretty much cleared it up perfectly. Looks like some good reference posts in future cases.
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Lol
I mentioned this exact problem weeks ago.... And now Scott has a thread about it..
I think the media might be a big part of the general problem. Where ever it/they started talking about it... They just lumped them all together....All, I think, because someone told them that they all used the same kernal so someone assumed they must be the same and it stuck - I kinda relate this to Scott's believed reasoning for the "wrong" to him use of pizza box.
All that being said, right or wrong as might be, I do agree that the name Linux really needs to be dumped from the media and most IT people... As said by Scott, most never deal with the kernel, they deal with the OS.
If we moved to only talking about distros I feel that much of the confusion around Linux distros would melt away.
For example you know if you're trying to install Exchange 2016, you know it only runs on Windows server. Now you need to know what versions support it.
If your that the unifi controller can be installed in Linux... Now you have to figure out what distro works and what version... This is an extra layer the Windows side doesn't have.
A question I have....Why do Linux distros need a grouped name....
Just start talking only about distros!
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@Dashrender only talking about one distro would sometimes work. So often it is "it runs on these 20" though. People very often want to talk about Linux in groups of things. Or they only care that something runs on "one of several." You'll notice that I often use the term "enterprise Linux" myself as a short hand for the properly supported server focused distros (basically CentOS / RHEL, Suse and Ubuntu.)
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That's doable for long time pros, but much less so for noobs like myself.
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For the general masses (including IT Pros), Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE...are all linux. Makes communication a lot easier for them to convey, not withstanding that it is the kernel not the OS itself.
For those in the knowledge, kernel is not OS..and for the rest, myself included, Linux was the OS..and the distros/flavors are just some sort of things.
Now, thanks to SAM, it's a bit clearer. I was wondering why, if distros are just how the OS is presented, theres yum, deb...and there's Gnome, KDE, Unity, etc.
To answer...But What to Call It?
My 2-cents for simplicity's sake, Linux will do for now (and perhaps for all eternity until everyone gets it)...and we all understand what we mean. It will be easier to adjust to a question (by newbie or IT fellows) than educate them with 5 paragraph or more explaining what has been explained above.
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@vhinzsanchez said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
For the general masses (including IT Pros), Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE...are all linux. Makes communication a lot easier for them to convey, not withstanding that it is the kernel not the OS itself.
Except it doesn't. Attempting to do this consistently causes confusion and huge discussions about what they mean because no two people use the "slang" term Linux in the same way or even consistently themselves. This very question came up because of a thread where no one could communicate for exactly this reason.
So it doesn't make things easier, it makes it way harder and often, wrong. And as we know, accuracy and semantics (really those two are the same thing) are the cornerstones of all technical fields.
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@vhinzsanchez said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
My 2-cents for simplicity's sake, Linux will do for now (and perhaps for all eternity until everyone gets it)...and we all understand what we mean.
What I've found, though, is that almost no one knows what is meant.
For example:
- Is KDE on FreeBSD Linux?
- Is VMware Linux?
- Is Android Linux?
- Is Windows Linux?
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@vhinzsanchez said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
It will be easier to adjust to a question (by newbie or IT fellows) than educate them with 5 paragraph or more explaining what has been explained above.
It's like "cloud". If you don't educate people as to the meaning, it doesn't make it easier, it actually just makes them unable to communicate at all - and unable to learn because they misunderstand everything that they are told. Just look at Spiceworks and what people say about cloud even still today. Not only does it cause confusion but it literally has made one of the most important architectures in IT literally "not exist" to that market because they've used the only word for it for something else and they can't tell that they've missed one of the biggest trends in IT in the last decade and a half! That's dramatic.
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@scottalanmiller said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
@vhinzsanchez said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
My 2-cents for simplicity's sake, Linux will do for now (and perhaps for all eternity until everyone gets it)...and we all understand what we mean.
What I've found, though, is that almost no one knows what is meant.
For example:
- Is KDE on FreeBSD Linux?
- Is VMware Linux?
- Is Android Linux?
- Is Windows Linux?
Here is what I've found...
- FreeBSD: Most people will call this Linux, but then be lost when Linux apps don't run on it. It's not Linux at all, but without understanding what Linux is, they can't tell.
- When we make Linux mean "anything I think looks like what I imagine Linux is", VMware suddenly because Linux because it has a BASH or BASH-like shell. This is a very popular point of Linux confusion.
- Android is absolutely Linux, and everyone knows it is Linux, and yet people generally don't mean Android when saying Linux because it won't run the apps that people mean nor does it look or feel like Linux. But it's a big part of the Linux eco system. Same with ChromeOS.
- A lot of people now confuse Windows with Linux. Yup, I'm serious. This new "Ubuntu on Windows" this is an operating environment popular in the Linux world ported to Windows, but it is Windows all the way down. Yet people call it Linux even though there is nothing Linux about it. So literally, people are now thinking that Windows is Linux!
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Scott - you're just adding more reasons that we need to not combine any of distros when talking about things. If you need to list out the distros, then just list them out. And frankly, you have to do this.
The instructions that exist to install the Unifi Controller on Ubuntu don't just work on CentOS, there are tweaks needed at minimum, and a complete rewrite of the install code at worse.
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If you dump calling things by the kernel, you'll also fix the FreeBSD, OSX, (now) Windows problems too. Linux isn't a thing that people care about, but listing 10 OSes that you can install your software on makes it easy to know that it will work on your system, as long as it's on that list.
For years Windows products listed the Windows versions that were supported. Now personally, I'm guessing that the need to put this list out there was because as a paid product, the company wanted to limit what OSes they offered included support on. In free stuff, you generally don't care as you'll have your one or two that you're programming for, and assuming the code is open sourced, then make the user worry about it if they want it elsewhere. With open source, support purchased stuff, it's critical to indicate what OSes you support for the reasons listed above. -
I've never understood the desire to lump things together under Linux. I'm always unclear when "CentOS, Suse and Ubuntu" ever matter as a "block" of things. Maybe it is because someone wants to know that one of them works, and any will do? But if so, wouldn't FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD or Dragonfly be okay too? If not, why not?
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@scottalanmiller said in Stop Calling it Linux, But What to Call It:
I've never understood the desire to lump things together under Linux. I'm always unclear when "CentOS, Suse and Ubuntu" ever matter as a "block" of things. Maybe it is because someone wants to know that one of them works, and any will do? But if so, wouldn't FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD or Dragonfly be okay too? If not, why not?
I think since they share a a lot of similar things, it makes it easy to do.
For example, if you know how to do some basic stuff in CentOS, it probably also works for the most part in Ubuntu. That's not the same moving between other platforms.
