Re:Aftermath of the Kernel Wars
by GauntletWizard on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @04:59PM
(#35794120)
There's plenty of people who do - see the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unikernel stuff and Firecracker VMs and simplified runtimes like Lambda - But agreed, a useful consumer computer requires a whole suite of programs and tools that comprise a "OS" to be useful.
You can't. You need more than just a kernel, quite a bit more, and that's an operating system. "GNU plus Linux" or whatever you want to call it, or Android, or whatever. In that sense Stallman is correct that "the Linux kernel is just one piece of the operating system" (although his insistence on GNU/Linux is still rather wrongheaded IMO, but I don't feel like repeating that discussion).