Most of what actually runs in userland on a desktop and even server isn't GNU. Sure, you got the glibc, bash and coreutils and a bunch of other shell tools. A lot of it is just a matter of preference and/or tradition; there is nothing making a lot of these tools unique and you could supplant a lot with alternatives e.g. from the BSDs.
But your modern desktop is probably Gnome or KDE or similar or something like i3 or similar. And tons of users run a shell other than bash. So why not KDE/Linux?
Your servers probably run stuff like containers, or node servers or php ones or java ones, or some database software and the like. How much of that is developed under the umbrella of GNU?
Your browsers most likely aren't GNU, your music players probably are not either, your videos get decoded and encoded by ffmpeg. Few probably edit their documents in GNU software, and even when it comes to text, GNU editors are far from dominant.
Few systems probably have their usage dominated by GNU (not merely GPL licensed) software, even if you count time spent in glibc.
So, to still insist that it's "GNU/Linux" sounds... a bit silly and narcissistic to me, given all the non GNU stuff that runs on a typical system and doesn't get - let alone requests - special mention.
It seems reasonable to use the term "GNU/Linux" to refer to a system based on Linux and the GNU C library and utilities. You could also just call it "Linux", but with the term "GNU/Linux" you distinguish it from Android and BusyBox-based systems (with some other, smaller C library, such as musl), which are also "Linux".
Certainly, you'd expect most of the CPU time to be spent in application software, but we're talking about how to name the platform, aren't we?
It started out as one, but it hasn't been run by GNU in years and years, probably well over a decade now. It's currently operated by the GNOME Foundation.
gtk.org, the active and current homepage of GTK+, says right there on the homepage:
> GTK+ is free software and part of the GNU Project.
GTK+ development does take place on gitlab.gnome.org, but it is still part of GNU (unlike the rest of GNOME, which did start out as part of GNU, but hasn't been run by GNU for years and years).
Android doesn't feel like Linux because Android throws out everything Unix-y about it, not because it isn't GNU.
The Nokia N900 wasn't a GNU system at all—the userland was a mix of a non-GNU libc and BusyBox—but it still felt like a Linux distro because the UI used X11 with GTK+ and Qt, it had a terminal with all your familiar *nix command-line utilities (thank you, BusyBox!), and app distribution was done through an apt frontend. A good many apps for the N900 were straight-up ports of existing Linux apps, too... the ecosystem was almost entirely FOSS.
Android goes out of its way to hide the terminal, the GUI is based on nothing from the desktop, and it has its own packaging and package distribution format.
Yes, sounds kind of funny to me. If you're building an embedded system with busybox, it's proper GNU/Linux, because busybox is GNU. But once you replace it with Toybox, it becomes not-quite-Linux.
Sure, you're right. But still working on Raspberry Pi with busybox make the same unixy feel as working on laptop with GNU coreutils (not to say on Raspbian with coreutils). So I don't think it makes much sense to make a distinction here. After all it's possible that some other implementation of coreutils gets adopted by major distros one day, and people would probably care less than they did about the transition from SysVinit to systemd.
Yes, and yes, but I know this, you know this, everyone on HN knows this, everything possible has been said, and reminding us doesn't contribute anything
