qbguy (Login dean.menezes) Linux from IP address 76.195.133.68
GNU is basically an organization that supports free software. It wanted to make a Unix-like system, so a bunch of people donated codes for programs (GNU ls, GNU echo, GNU tar, etc.). Eventually, everything except the kernel (which is GNU/Hurd but is still not done). Then about this time, Linus made the Linux kernel. Then other people combined it with GCC, and the other GNU utilities and other programs like Firefox, OpenOffice, Apache, and called the whole things like "Red Hat Linux" or "Slackware Linux" or "Ubuntu Linux"
GNU could have done this but had not bothered to do the work to make a usable distribution (as more than a collection of tarballs) and were happily ignoring Linux and telling everyone else to ignore it and use GNU-Hurd when it would be ready "any time now".
Plus, you can get versions of the GNU utilities compiled for Windows, but it does not make your system GNU/Windows. Like I have ls, tr, etc., tar, gcc, gfortran, and gnuchess on Windows, but it's still MS Windows and not GNU/MS Windows.
There are some useful GNU utilities,but Linux gets
it's greatness from a lot of other sources.
I don't think that any 1 distribution of Linux or Unix will suit
everybody.
People actually wonder why I use Linux because they've never seen
a modern Linux with a GUI. I like the GUI,but I also do almost
everything in the terminal too.
The one thing about Linux that bothers me is software dependencies. It is
hard to compile the source of most things because they depend on tons of libraries.
Still,this saves space because then all the applications that use them
can read them from their proper location. I couldn't dream of installing
all those things without synaptic though.
The libraries are necessary for a very good reason - NOT reinventing the wheel.
After all, why would you create your own XML parser, etc., when libxml and libxslt can do things for you?
Likewise, Firefox depends on GTK+ in Linux, which depends on Cairo, Pango, ATK, and I think a couple more, plus things like libxml, libxslt and such.
Obviously if someone has already done the work, why would you create your own stuff to reinvent the wheel and bloat your sources and sometimes even your binaries? ^_^
Anyway, that's what libraries are for. As for other dependencies, would you rather not have SDL downloaded when you wanted to install DOSBox so you can use QBasic or QB? :P
------------------
Waiting patiently for Windows 7, XHTML 2.0, CSS 3.0, PHP 6.0, the ratification of C++0x, and the day that I can code without logic troubles.
