Linux

Ñu

I pronounce it GNU

I honestly didn’t know people pronounced it any other way than gee-en-you. It’s in all caps, so I figured you said each letter.

Now that I think more about it though, I don’t know why I assumed that. I don’t say AWOL as ay-doubleyou-oh-el. I don’t say SNAFU as es-en-ay-ef-you.

I’m just going to call it the OS for yaks from now on and never think about it again.

You mean you don't pronounce it "GNU's Not Unix" to all of your compatriots?

HP released the Dev One laptop running Linux once.

For your second point, do you say that you use Adobe or Windows?

Or how about if I said I made this cool image using Linux? More likely I'd say I used GIMP or ImageMagick or some specific command line tool.

Linux is just the kernel. It's an amazing kernel, but it's only half the story. The tools on top of it are just as important as the kernel. That's the point of saying GNU/Linux is to call out the other half of the whole experience.

The reason GNU/Linux isn't popular to say is that it doesn't provide any real information. "I run Linux" and "I run GNU/Linux" doesn't really tell you anything. "I run Debian", "I run Fedora", "I run Arch BTW", those all tell you something different.

I can't speak to the OS landscape when Linux was released. Maybe saying that you ran GNU/Minix or Bell/Unix or whatever combinations might have existed would have made sense. However at this point it doesn't.

I always pronounced it guh-new as in “Gary Gnu”.

How is it supposed to be pronounced?

"I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!"

Copyleft ensures that fixes, improvements, etc make it back into the main project. Permissive stuff allows capitalist behemoths to take your shit and run. The latter is personal preference. Some people care that their work is being passed onto others.

Most people don't use them. And nobody is calling them GNU/