[pxc]

Yes, Android is absolutely not GNU enough. This terminological goofiness is the flipside of using the term 'Linux' to refer to a whole bunch of GNU/Linux operating systems.

Here's the thing though, this is not even about abstract ideals. When we say Android is not 'real Linux', what it comes down to is this: there's a certain peace, a sense of relief— of being respected— that comes with running Linux on your personal desktop or server. It feels really, really different from using an OS whose main function, which has driven its evolution, is just to sell you paid apps and services. That makes it fun, and it lends itself to a certain fluency.

Running any variety of Android is just an alien experience to all of that. Android doesn't feel good to use the way that Linux does for people who like running Linux on other contexts. And that's why it makes perfect sense to say it's 'not Linux enough'. The experience speaks powerfully enough for itself that it hardly seems worth explaining tbh. If you actually get what is good about running Linux and you've ever sought those virtues in Android, you already get it.

[Dalewyn]

>When we say Android is not 'real Linux', what it comes down to is this: there's a certain peace, a sense of relief— of being respected— that comes with running Linux on your personal desktop or server. It feels really, really different from using an OS whose main function, which has driven its evolution, is just to sell you paid apps and services. That makes it fun, and it lends itself to a certain fluency.

Might just be me, but I don't feel any respect coming from whoever are the devs that made this week's flavor of Linux I might be trying out.

Yeah, Windows 10/11 and iOS, and to a slightly lesser extent MacOS and Android, all aim primarily to sell me their shit. I hate them all for that. I run an OS to run the shit I want on my computer, not the shit they want on their computer.

Linux, though, aims to primarily sell me their ideological shit: FOSS, free as in freedom, GPL, Command Line Interface or bust. Instead of commercial pursuits, it's dogmatic pursuits.

They're all the same sides of the same shit sandwich. I get to choose what's in the sandwich, but it's still a shit sandwich until the heat death of the universe. Fuck that noise.

That all being said, Android is Linux. Because it runs the Linux kernel. End of. QED. Anyone who argues to the contrary is just being spiteful of Android succeeding where the wider Linux community could not.