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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2026
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Ah, so there’s no Linux in Android and it’s running some other kernel. Must have been mistaken, sorry.
I wonder what will be the point where we stop calling SteamOS a Linux distribution too. Maybe greybeards and their GNU/Linux thing were right. But now Ubuntu switched to Rust coreutils, I guess it’s no longer Linux. Apple recently stopped certifying POSIX compatibility so MacOS is longer UNIX even if they run BSD coreutils. Gosh, darnit.
tell me, how much do you interact with linux when you are on an Android Phone? 0 percent perhaps? No, you start in the single user application of android and that's it.
SteamOS meanwhile is a full featured Linux distro, heck Steam in that Distro makes it super easy to switch to "Desktop Mode" e.g. KDE.
Linux is a kernel. If you try to define it as more you’ll find yourself in a land of contradictions due to previously mentioned examples.
Android is “Linux”. It might not have GNU userland or X11/Wayland. It is essentially a commoditised appliance but there’s Linux kernel there. KDE runs on many different Unix-like systems, it’s not something that defines Linux.
If I log into a remote Linux shell where a system administrator locked me out of most of the things, does it make it less Linux?