Comment on Firefox is fine. The people running it are not
pupbiru@aussie.zone 5 days agoand my point is that these things aren’t definitions that have particularly concrete categories… an operating system is not a single thing: it can be many different things which include things like GUIs even… as much as we try to fit the world into neat little boxes, that’s just not how things work
even the categories of operating systems is messy: take single user vs multi user… macos is single user, but openbsd is multi user… i’m the beginning, the kernel was largely the same but due to the system tools and configuration, macos became a different classification of operating system
it’s all super messy, and saying that windows vista and windows 11 are the same operating system is extremely reductive
mholiv@lemmy.world 5 days ago
But we can agree that there are upper and lower limits though. And I believe that we can now agree that system utilities and system libraries are outside of that limit. Just because the edge are fuzzy, don’t mean we can’t come to any conclusions at all.
Any now stepping way way back. I think we can now agree that Fedora, Ubuntu and other distros run the same operating system. That operating system being Linux.
pupbiru@aussie.zone 5 days ago
i certainly don’t agree that system utilities and libraries are outside of that limit and said as much when i commented on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: its its own thing… its neither linux, nor freebsd. it is however based on both
the gui is definitively part of the operating system - confirmed by that wikipedia page that you linked (though i’d say only in the case where the gui is heavily tied to the default configuration of the OS like windows, macos, android, etc), and that’s nowhere near the kernel
mholiv@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Ok. I have one question then. I think we can come to a clear resolution with it.
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, what percentage is it Linux?
It includes 100% the apps, system tools, GUIs, and libraries that you associate with Linux. It also has 0 lines of Linux code in it.
If you can justify that it is above >0% Linux I will use your definition of operating system going forward.
pupbiru@aussie.zone 5 days ago
i don’t think percentage is a useful distinction… how do you measure that? by lines of code? by behavioural traits? my point throughout this discussion is that it’s not as clean as any of that
as i said: its its own thing… it is neither linux, debian, nor is it freebsd… in the same way that android is an operating system distinct from other flavours of linux