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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 20th, 2023

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  • Of course you don’t operate the kernel, but the kernel operates the system.

    My point is that there are many layers between the kernel and user and which you interact with depends on the person. The only common point between all these, at least for linux, is the linux kernel itself.

    I get that the “axchually GNU/linux” is just a joke, but considering how much impact linux has versus GNU, it’s totally fine to omit it. You can totally just use busybox instead and you’re still using a Linux OS.


  • Then where do you draw the line?

    The vast majority of people also don’t interact with the GNU tools at all, so GNU/Linux isn’t the OS either. KDE would be, or perhaps the distro itself. I’m not sure I’d call the OS GNU/Linux/Ubuntu/KDE. At that point might as well throw in firefox, for many it’s pretty much all the interaction they have with the computer.

    Or what about the distros that don’t use the GNU coreutils? They are generally still called linux and still get to run apps made for linux, even with no traces of GNU.


















  • Which is exaxtly what I said, that it’s fast enough for most use cases.

    In theory though, you will “gain performance” by rewriting it (well) in C for literally anything. Even if it’s disk/io, the actual time spent in your code will be lower, while the time spent in kernel mode will be just as long.

    For example, you are running a server which reads files and returns data based on said files. The act of reading the file won’t be much faster, but if written in C, your parsers and actual logic behind what to do with the file will be.

    But it’s as you said, this actual tiny performance gain isn’t worth it over development/resource cost most of the time.