What you are referring to isn't Linux. It's Linux + a free desktop compliant userspace. Linux is just a kernel which is in fact shared between both. I'm not sure why the community hasn't come up with a better name to help disambiguate the two.

People talk about the Linux kernel vs linux (the complete system).

I’m not sure why nerds are still litigating this sort of thing years after the who gnu linux thing.

> linux (the complete system)

Like Android?

>I’m not sure why nerds are still litigating this sort of thing years after the who gnu linux thing.

Because most Linux users are no longer interacting with GNU/Linux.

How do you mean? The "Android kernel" is not meaningfully different from the Linux kernel.

4.4BSD however was released in 1993, so iOS would've had decades to diverge from it.

But we'll not know unless they open source it. chuckle

Darwin is open source. Here's the repo for their kernel: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/main. The userspace stuff can be found here: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO.... Some stuff that's missing from those links, such as launchd, can be found here: https://github.com/apple-opensource?tab=repositories