Sure, in the way orcs were elves once.

That's a ridiculous comparison, the Android kernel patchset is tiny https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common-patches/

It consists of "massive" changes such as:

> Enable writable clock debugfs files which are required for debugging and testing

and

> Allow drivers to register hooks when IPIs are sent and handled. The statistics of these IPIs are helpful in predicting CPU idle states

I suppose any distro backporting fixes is also not Linux? RHEL definitely can't be Linux if Android isn't.

This disagreement is purely about semantics.

In case its not clear, Linux the operating system typically means the Linux kernel plus a set of unix-inspired GPL-licenced userspace tools. Some (still) call this GNU/Linux, although that is a bit of a mouthful.

Android has a completely different userspace to "Linux". The kernel is not the issue.

Well that's silly, the userspace you are talking about is strictly useless on phones. Every single attempt at building a reasonable mobile userspace for GNU/Linux has been a complete failure. What would that even look like? Almost all graphical GNU/Linux tools depend on X11, which is completely unsuited for phones.

But if you want, you can totally install all the GNU userspace tools on Android. Nothing is stopping you from doing that.

Nevertheless, there is something people call "Linux" that is a full OS (rather than just a kernel). Android differs substantially from that.

Just semantics.

Yes, but that is fundamentally incompatible with phones! It's an oxymoron, like a Windows 2000 phone.

Marricks's comment simply does not make any sense if we're to use that definition of "Linux".

Marrick's comment makes even less sense using a definition of Linux that includes Android, since they lists three different options: iOS, Android and Linux.

"No one is going to spend billions of dollars to get you to buy Linux.", Marrick said. Perhaps they were including the resources required to make something that is recognisably Linux that is compatible with phones, and polished enough to be appealing to the average consumer?

>Marrick's comment makes even less sense using a definition of Linux that includes Android, since they lists three different options: iOS, Android and Linux.

They could just have not known this, it's not obvious if you've never tried to open a terminal on an Android phone.

But how is Android not recognisably Linux? You can natively run all the Linux stuff you'd like on Android.

This is false. Sent from my Pinephone with Mobian.

Android is linux as much as iOS is BSD

What you are referring to isn't Linux. It's Linux + a free desktop compliant userspace. Linux is just a kernel which is in fact shared between both. I'm not sure why the community hasn't come up with a better name to help disambiguate the two.

People talk about the Linux kernel vs linux (the complete system).

I’m not sure why nerds are still litigating this sort of thing years after the who gnu linux thing.

> linux (the complete system)

Like Android?

>I’m not sure why nerds are still litigating this sort of thing years after the who gnu linux thing.

Because most Linux users are no longer interacting with GNU/Linux.

How do you mean? The "Android kernel" is not meaningfully different from the Linux kernel.

4.4BSD however was released in 1993, so iOS would've had decades to diverge from it.

But we'll not know unless they open source it. chuckle

Darwin is open source. Here's the repo for their kernel: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/main. The userspace stuff can be found here: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO.... Some stuff that's missing from those links, such as launchd, can be found here: https://github.com/apple-opensource?tab=repositories

With a license that prohibits OEMs from distributing forked versions.