> Alpine is not Gnu/Linux too, but BusyBox/musl/Linux, maybe it makes others sad that you don't know the difference.
I'm more concerned with the practical significance of calling Android or ChromeOS a Linux distribution than being pedantic for the history books.
Sure, Alpine doesn't use the usual userland you'll find on most Linux distributions but it isn't an alien experience and you can use it mostly like any other Linux distribution out there. You'll still find a POSIX shell and a package manager to install packages. There's Xorg or Wayland for the GUI and you'll find familiar desktop environments and window managers.
Unlike Android, you won't find absence of root access on Alpine. There's no restriction on placement of data on directories like /usr and /var. You won't find dozens of UIDs for different processes running at the same time on a single user system. You can't just slap Android on any hardware x86_64 hardware you want and expect it to work fine. Hell, you can't even do that on ARM devices if you're not using out-of-tree patches and firmware blobs. The bluetooth and audio stack on Android is completely different than what you'll use on any Linux distribution.
So yeah, if we're being pedantic, sure, Android is a Linux distribution because it uses the Linux kernel. Good luck using it like a typical Linux distribution though.
> For years exactly that was written on Apples own macOSX page, but you know it better right?
What I wrote above. Sure, pages written decades ago indicate that the Apple used FreeBSD as its base for its kernel but I doubt their kernel is anything close to upstream FreeBSD at this point. The same goes for their userland and graphics stack. Would you call OrbisOS, used by PS4, a distribution of FreeBSD? Can you do anything meaningful with it like you can with FreeBSD?
I'm more concerned with the practical significance of calling Android or ChromeOS a Linux distribution than being pedantic for the history books.
Sure, Alpine doesn't use the usual userland you'll find on most Linux distributions but it isn't an alien experience and you can use it mostly like any other Linux distribution out there. You'll still find a POSIX shell and a package manager to install packages. There's Xorg or Wayland for the GUI and you'll find familiar desktop environments and window managers.
Unlike Android, you won't find absence of root access on Alpine. There's no restriction on placement of data on directories like /usr and /var. You won't find dozens of UIDs for different processes running at the same time on a single user system. You can't just slap Android on any hardware x86_64 hardware you want and expect it to work fine. Hell, you can't even do that on ARM devices if you're not using out-of-tree patches and firmware blobs. The bluetooth and audio stack on Android is completely different than what you'll use on any Linux distribution.
So yeah, if we're being pedantic, sure, Android is a Linux distribution because it uses the Linux kernel. Good luck using it like a typical Linux distribution though.
> For years exactly that was written on Apples own macOSX page, but you know it better right?
What I wrote above. Sure, pages written decades ago indicate that the Apple used FreeBSD as its base for its kernel but I doubt their kernel is anything close to upstream FreeBSD at this point. The same goes for their userland and graphics stack. Would you call OrbisOS, used by PS4, a distribution of FreeBSD? Can you do anything meaningful with it like you can with FreeBSD?