Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by _wmd 2822 days ago
I daresay the Ubuntu userspace WSL ships with absolutely eclipses the kernel in terms of lines of code. For all intents and purposes it's another Linux distro, essentially with just one or two core packages swapped out.

Excluding drivers, documentation and non-x86 arch code, Linux is "only" 173mb of uncompressed source (39mb gzipped). The Debian source repository is 103GB compressed, or, put another way, the replaced code amounts to about 0.03% of what makes up Debian.
1 comments
umanwizard 2822 days ago
This might be true but what does it matter?

It would in theory be totally possible with enough work to make Ubuntu run on the FreeBSD kernel, does that mean FreeBSD is Linux?

link
_wmd 2822 days ago
Turning that on its head, if you removed all of userspace and just left the kernel, would it be truthful to call what remains Linux? I'd say in common parlance that is what's called "the Linux kernel", and what people mean when they say Linux more thoroughly refers to the work of distributions than it has anything to do with the kernel

Linux of the early 00s was popularized on a platform of "Linux is about freedom, Linux is about choice". At least one half of that is entirely due to the distributions.

link
umanwizard 2822 days ago
You're right from a user perspective, sure.

From a programmer's perspective, you are writing a program which interacts with the world by making system calls to the kernel. So the kernel is fundamentally more relevant than the fact that the system is running Wayland and comes with LibreOffice.

link