Linux or GNU / Linux?

Linux is just the kernel of the Operating System, responsible for performing communication between hardware (printers, monitors, keyboard, etc.) and software.

GNU (which is a recursive acronym for GNU's not Unix ) is a project developed by Richard Stallman in 1983 that aims to create a complete operating system with free software only. The GNU project was responsible for developing several programs used in the GNU / Linux Operating System, such as the GNU C Compiler (gcc), the Emacs text editor, several programs that you use daily in the terminal, among many other utilities. >

So we have Linux is the core of an Operating System, not very useful in itself for end users, and GNU project programs are the other programs that, in conjunction with Linux, make up the GNU / Linux Operating System .

Richard Stallman's initial idea was to get GNU itself to develop a core for the Operating System, but since that was never done (to date there is no stable version of the GNU core), when Linus Torvalds launched Linux in 1991 it was incorporated into GNU programs and distributed as a complete Operating System.

In the end, neither party agrees on how the Operating System should be called, and the name Linux is most commonly used only because it is simpler than GNU/Linux .

It's worth reading what the top two developers in this story have to say about it:

Richard Stallman in a ZNET interview in 2005:

  

Linux was not designed with the goal of liberating cyberspace, and the motives for Linux would not have given the whole GNU / Linux system.

     

Today you have of millions of users are using an operating system that was developed so they could have freedom - but they do not know this, because they think the system is Linux and that it was developed by a student "just for fun '. "

And the Torvalds review :

  

Umm, this discussion has gone quite long enough, thank you very much.

     

It really does not matter what people call Linux, as long as credit is due (on both sides). Personally, I'll very much continue to call it "Linux"

The question already answers this. If the biggest subject experts do not understand about this, it is not an answer in SOpt that will tell you which one is correct.

There seems to be no doubt that the kernel is just Linux. The system as a whole for me is also Linux, but the FSF thinks it's GNU / Linux. In practice only FSF fanatics call Linux GNU / Linux. The fact is that this does not change anyone's life and only paranoids actually spend more than a few seconds on the subject.

• Wikipedia

GNU is certainly part of building the Linux operating system but I do not think it should take all the credit.

The Linux kernel itself did not come from a GNU package, if it were not for the Linux kernel, there would be no GNU operating system, I think that every Linux distribution should be called by its name as Red Hat, Debian, among others and not GNU / Linux.

In my opinion, if you do a Linux distribution will you put the name as GNU / Linux? Certainly not.

The tip is: