I know, I got the wording from some online website. Linux phones doesn’t make too much sense to me, I would prefer to just call them GNU phones. The kernel can’t be what defines this group of OSs when the main OS you’re trying to exclude from this group runs the same one. GNU-like is a compromise.
Using the word Linux to describe the operating system makes no sense in general. You never know if someone is talking about the OS or the kernel. GNU was developed by different people with a different philosophy and goals. When people say Linux, they usually mean GNU/Linux (Linux Mint, Arch Linux, etc). But there is also Alpine Linux, which doesn’t use GNU at all, so it’s not exactly the same thing. And why even name the OS after the kernel? Doesn’t the name Alpine Linux sound like it’s just a fork of Linux? It’s super confusing and people mix it up all the time, even this community of GNU/Linux users and under this post.
Android uses a heavily modified fork of Linux, so it doesn’t use the same Linux that we use on desktop and it’s definitely not a GNU/Linux operating system. So I don’t know if we can call it “Linux”.
Then there is Ubuntu Touch and I don’t even know how to call that. GNU/Android maybe?
But the phones that we are talking about here I would say that those are GNU/Linux phones. Because even though many people run postmarketOS on them, they are designed to run GNU/Linux and they are shipped with it. But the phones designed to run Ubuntu Touch are something else. Maybe we should just call them Android phones, because I think that’s what they are mostly designed to run.
PinePhone and Librem 5 actually run GNU/Linux. Same software that you can run on desktop. Only Ubuntu Touch uses Android kernel I think.
Some people take offense in referring to Alpine/postmarketOS as GNU.
That makes sense, but there are other popular mobile distros too. For example: Manjaro ARM and Mobian (mobile Debian).
I know, I got the wording from some online website. Linux phones doesn’t make too much sense to me, I would prefer to just call them GNU phones. The kernel can’t be what defines this group of OSs when the main OS you’re trying to exclude from this group runs the same one. GNU-like is a compromise.
Using the word Linux to describe the operating system makes no sense in general. You never know if someone is talking about the OS or the kernel. GNU was developed by different people with a different philosophy and goals. When people say Linux, they usually mean GNU/Linux (Linux Mint, Arch Linux, etc). But there is also Alpine Linux, which doesn’t use GNU at all, so it’s not exactly the same thing. And why even name the OS after the kernel? Doesn’t the name Alpine Linux sound like it’s just a fork of Linux? It’s super confusing and people mix it up all the time, even this community of GNU/Linux users and under this post.
Android uses a heavily modified fork of Linux, so it doesn’t use the same Linux that we use on desktop and it’s definitely not a GNU/Linux operating system. So I don’t know if we can call it “Linux”.
Then there is Ubuntu Touch and I don’t even know how to call that. GNU/Android maybe?
But the phones that we are talking about here I would say that those are GNU/Linux phones. Because even though many people run postmarketOS on them, they are designed to run GNU/Linux and they are shipped with it. But the phones designed to run Ubuntu Touch are something else. Maybe we should just call them Android phones, because I think that’s what they are mostly designed to run.