GNU/Linux Is 38 Years Old This Month (Or Is It 28 Years Old?)

In the past few days, many people were writing articles and making videos celebrating the 30th birthday of "Linux". I wanted to take the time to clarify that "Linux" is just kernel. So how old exactly is our operating system--which is GNU/Linux?

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[ctam]

It's Linus Torvalds' hobby project that turned 30 not GNU.

[_..---]

GNU and Linux should both be celebrated

[noferblatz]

Technically, GNU wasn't an operating system until Linus developed the kernel. What Stallman had was a bunch of utilities he had created in answer to Unix's proprietary utilities. But without a kernel, it wasn't an OS. Stallman's chafed at the term "Linux" for the OS for 30 years, but it's Stallman, so that explains it. To be fair, the Linux kernel without the utilities isn't an OS either. Both are necessary. But the name "GNU/Linux" is just Stallman goofiness.

[abaneyone]

Hey DT. Have you ever been out in public and someone recognizes you from all your Linux video content? If it hasn't happened yet it will soon man, you're the Linux guy. :D I appreciate all your work, thank you!

[gamertechuni]

Most distros don't bundle all the gnu software, they mainly bundle coreutils and glibc. Linux is a general name for all the software that goes in a distro.

[Doing_Time]

I'm so dang old that my first linux book came with a slackware 1.0 CD

[michaelheimbrand]

As a BSD guy I´m probably not the right person to debate. But shouldn´t we consider the history of UNIX a bit more? I mean, the GNU part is more or less a reverse engineered UNIX userland, and Linus (I think) did mostly the same thing with the kernel. In fact, you could also argue that the GNU/Linux story was a bit of a rerun. Because what happened there also happened in a different way when BSD was born in the late 70´s. Anyway, the daddy´s of it all regardless of their background is of course Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie and what they did at Bell labs in the late 60´s and early 70´s. That is what I think it´s important to remind people of. Nothing including Linux, Internet or the C language and even Windows or TCP/IP and basically everything else about IT would be the same if we didn´t have those two brilliant minds inventing UNIX. I think that´s a lot more important to point out. PS. TCP/IP was invented on BSD. So without BSD we wouldn´t even have the ability to watch this video. Or maybe I´m just bitter about how much everybody is talking about Linux when I think BSD deserve a lot more attention than it gets.

[pbbrut]

Linus actually ported gcc and bash to his kernel. GNU didn't do that. They might've ported all of their other tiny little shell apps like cp and mv, but I don't name my Linux system after the company that built cp.

But anyway, several distros have abandoned GNU tools so what do we call them? MUSL/Linux?

The shell tools as you've already pointed out are being rewritten in Rust by random people online. Is it now penguinsniffer45/Linux because he wrote the rust based tools?

People are switching to shells like fish and others because they're dramatically faster and more feature complete. So there goes bash.

People have largely abandoned the gcc compiler in favor of clang/llvm and then Rust, of course.

Just call it Linux before it becomes too difficult to call it something else when the time comes. Or better yet Ubuntu, Fedora, whatever. It makes less and less sense to call it GNU/Linux these days.

Love your content though. FYI

[sbrazenor]

Well, UNIX is 52 years old, so GNU/Linux is still pretty young.

[guidoguloff]

I am celebrating Linux every Day! Thank GNU/Linux for the Freedom! And Derek for all the inspiration, what linux can do for us.
Sorry for my english, i am german. Peace!

[thedanmethenyshow.]

Those are some great points you have brought up.

[charlessmith]

IMO the point where GNU was combined with Linux is the moment GNU/Linux was born. But GNU and Linux each have their own anniversaries too.

[NebulaHatesWatchdog]

Most people say that the first Linux distro was SLS but that spot actually goes to MCC Interim Linux and TAMU was the first to support X

[bologna]

are you in VR? Whats all that green stuff?

[lb]

GUN is why open source exist in the first place, Stallman deserves more recognition

[SupaShang]

We just forked the birthday. Welcome to Linux.

[hostgrady]

Actually if we are counting discontinued distros the earliest "distro" of GNU/Linux was just that, a copy of GNU tools and the kernel Linux on 2 floppy drives, created around the sametime as the kernel in 1991.

If we count the X window system as the first complete distro then SLS created in 1992 is the first GNU/Linux distro. And slackware itself is based on the now defunct SLS and so is Debian.

So I think SLS really deserves the credit personally.

[TylerAnglace]

as a noob in compsci and a history nerd this was a great video

[bologna]

Linus does deserve some great deal of respect but so does everybody else because uh.. I hate Windows, however i am very grateful have another option.

[tyh]

Linux kernel + GNU + "perfect storm" = Linux