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by Shared404 1610 days ago
Fair point. I feel like you could make a case for $DE/Linux on desktop, $COREUTILS/Linux on server and Android/Linux on mobile then whenever greater precision is needed.

That said, how often do you need to distinguish between the Coreutils in use? If you say Linux server, unless you specify something out of the ordinary, everyone will assume you have GNU or Busybox coreutils - which doesn't matter that much, you can do pretty much anything with either afaik - and whatever server software is in use. Or on desktop, you can just mention the distro in question and everyone will know or be able to find out all of the above. Why specify every single time?

1 comments

Honestly you probably should prefer to specify by distro, and use the userspace+kernel convention only when you specifically care or it matters for some reason. If I say Fedora, I probably don't need to say "Fedora GNU/Linux", since GNU and Linux (as well as RPM and systemd) are implicit in "Fedora". On the other hand, "Debian" usually means "Debian GNU/Linux" but Debian has a living HURD version (Debian GNU/HURD) and a basically-dead FreeBSD version (Debian GNU/kFreeBSD), and experimental work has been done to allow replacing its coreutils with... I think the Rust rewrite? So there it can be useful to specify.

And, of course, the other reason is because we are Hackers and hackers love their pedantry;)

All valid points!

> And, of course, the other reason is because we are Hackers and hackers love their pedantry;)

Some things never change :P