With all the current news and projects and desire for

Question

With all the current news and projects and desire for

a "Linux smartphone", I see a lot of people saying "why not use Android? Android is Linux." But that is a very misleading statement. It might be a meme, but Richard Stallman is absolutely correct when he says that "What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux". When you say "I want a Linux smartphone", you really mean that you want a GNU/Linux smartphone.

Sure, Android uses the Linux kernel, but you never actually interact with the kernel in any OS, be it a GNU/Linux distro, Windows, or Android. Even when you are in a terminal on GNU/Linux, you are actually interacting with a bunch of GNU utilities, like Bash, which then make the actual Linux kernel system calls.

Android is Linux, but it's not GNU. Instead, it's a totally different Java based runtime running on the Linux kernel. Android even replaces the GNU C Library, with its own alternative called Bionic. glibc is a component that operates at a much lower level than the majority of us regular GNU/Linux users ever interact with, but it's still not in Android, showing just how different of a user experience Android is.

And that's the thing. You don't want a Linux phone, you want the GNU user experience and environment. I reckon if your distro of choice swapped out the Linux kernel for say, Hurd, and all the GNU programs that you use every day continue to work the same, you wouldn't even notice. Unless you are a kernel developer, or a dev of low level system libraries, you never actually interact directly with Linux.

Android is not Linux, it's Android/Linux.

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08.04.2021

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> Android is not Linux > it's Linux.

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08.04.2021

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With all the current news and projects and desire for

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