[ale] difference between android and linux ?

[David Tomaschik]

On 08/12/2011 05:59 PM, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> On 08/12/2011 05:15 PM, Ron Frazier wrote:
>> Thanks for the info.  OK, the essence of what you're saying is, Android 
>> is a variant of Linux and Ubuntu (and other similar) are variants of 
>> Linux, but as a practical matter, they're not software compatible.
> Your confusion is understandable.  Our community often refers to whole
> systems as "Linux".  A lot of people in our community for years said
> that was a dandy term because it was unambiguous.  Some have argued for
> years that it is ambiguous because of the lack of understanding it
> yields, and today, when the Linux kernel is used in more places than
> most other operating system kernels, this ambiguity is coming to light.
>
> Neither Android nor Ubuntu are "Linux variants".  They are both systems
> which are built on top of the Linux kernel.  Furthermore, there are
> other, non-Android/Linux, non-GNU/Linux systems out there, albeit of
> quite limited popularity.
>

To pile on to this excellent discussion, I like to refer to operating
systems as "GNU/Linux-based" just to make it clear that even beyond GNU
utils and the kernel, there's a lot more to it.  (Of course, then we
could call it udev/dbus/x.org/upstart/GNU/Linux or some such insane
variant.)

David