why are they calling it an os then? cosplaying arnold kling?

Its fairly common to refer to Linux distros as an OS, or even include OS in the distro name (Pop!_OS, NixOS, CentOS). Linux is the kernel, and disros add stuff to make a functional operating system.

It's a trademark thing; there are some prerequisites and manual approval involved before you get to officially name your distro "[Distro Name] Linux".

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark

that's not much of an excuse for pretending to have written an os; the only real requirement in https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/sublicense-agreement is that you acknowledge that linus torvalds owns the linux trademark

ChromeOS

SteamOS

PopOS

ElementaryOS

EndeavourOS

ZorinOS

CentOS

SerpentOS

Cosplayers, all of them!

MacOS

MacOS is not a Linux distribution, though.

Well why are they calling it an OS then!

Because at Apple, everyone was under the Ontological Supposition that Jobs was the second coming.

Because it is one? Linux distros are a subset of OSs.

macos is an actual operating system, a variant of mach

It is true that macOS is a bad example here because it is not using a Linux kernel.

But Apple also names operating systems that use the same kernel different "OSes": iOS and iPadOS share a kernel with macOS, and for all I can tell, so do watchOS and tvOS.

An operating system consists of both a kernel and a userland. The Linux kernel by itself does not make an OS. I think this makes it legitimate to call CentOS, NixOS, SerpentOS, iOS, watchOS, etc., OSes.

i think the ios and centos people are putting on airs because they wish they were ken thompson

> iOS and iPadOS share a kernel with macOS, and for all I can tell, so do watchOS and tvOS.

Even worse is that iPadOS and iOS are effectively the same operating system, one ships with a phone dialer and the other ships with UI tweaks for tablets. I would not be shocked if they are built from the same source tree.

Without being too pedantic, MacOS was to Unix what ChromeOS/AndroidOS is to Linux so I stand by my comment.

unlike, say, illumos, macos doesn't contain anything genetically descended from the v6 unix kernel; the darwin kernel is mach, with chunks of freebsd grafted into it, chunks that carefully reimplemented without copying the functionality in original unix

by contrast, 'chromeos' and android run on fairly normal linux. they even keep up with linus's tree, and though they do have their own patches, they try to get them merged back into linus's tree

I'd like to interject for a moment...

I love that you don't even need to write the rest of the comment! I bet even LLMs know where you were going :-)