I can’t blame people given how many parts of the Internet now engage in automated or semi-automated intransparent censorship. Can’t have the general public communicating freely with each other, they might coordinate a revolution or something. So far I trust the fediverse to be relatively immune from that though.

so by now even Microsoft acknowledges that it has lost the battle of making computing synonymous with Windows?

FOSS release of Windows when?

Ubuntu supports a wider range of devices than Debian? Since when? I was under the impression that Debian supported all or nearly all architectures the Linux kernel supports, Ubuntu only a few popular ones?

Debian is food at peaceful !

the thing is that not all of them use systemd or bash or zsh or even X11 (servers don’t usually have X11 installed)

All of them use a Linux kernel and many components that were originally developed for GNU, especially the C library.

GTK being a part of GNU (at least originally)

“The OS” doesn’t exist. The operating systems you’re talking about are called Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, RHEL, etc etc. The main work of making an actually usable OS from the various free software components others have written has always been done by the teams responsible for these products.

But we still need a way to refer to them collectively, and it used to make sense to call them “Linux” because they were pretty much the only operating systems that used the Linux kernel, but now that Android is the most widely used OS on the planet, it doesn’t anymore, and this alone is a reason to say GNU/Linux unless you want to include Android.

ahhh i remember being a bored teenager spending his life customizing his desktop too…

Nowadays I just want a working system where I can get things done, haven’t touched my desktop environment settings in a while and certainly don’t use things like cubes or wobbly windows anymore.

https://xkcd.com/1989/

Linux on an Intel-based MacBook Air was my daily driver for years. It worked perfectly fine; battery life was lower than on macOS though.

Since the 80’s, Linux has been using a display server called the X Window System

This is, of course, not true, given that Linux did not yet exist in the 1980s.

Unix-like systems that predate Linux did already use it in the 1980s.

by default yes, this can be changed back though

Because DOS and later Windows used to be the only OS that was relevant for IBM PC compatible systems. Only later were eg. Unix-like systems developed for them.

Something like that already exists, look up Freedom Phone

Ah true, censorship really wasn’t quite as bad in 2015 yet, point taken

What has changed significantly since 2015?

historically a “PC” is a machine compatible with the “IBM PC” and the only OS available for that was DOS or later Windows

Of course then Unix-like operating systems started to become available for the same machines, and Apple switched to Intel processors for a while too.

When Android was still new, lots of people thought of it as “Linux for phones”.

What is the difference between believers and heretics? Well, the heretics believe that 2+2 equals 3. Meanwhile, we believers know that 2+2 obviously equals 5.

And fair use exists to protect free speech.