The nerd spins around on his chair, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually, you use GNU/linux. Linux isn't an operating system unto itself-"
I cut him off, "actually, I use Alpine, a distribution that contains none of the GNU corelibs or utils*, it's linux, but it's not GNU+linux."
The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth and drops to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!"
Cooly, I reply "if Windows was compiled with gcc, would that make it GNU?" I interrupt his response with "-and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. Even if you were correct, you won't be for long."
With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. He lies on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death.
*This is where I had to look it up.
@Zergling_man
You probably still have gnutls somewhere in there 😋
Or gmp, or mpfr… some of that stuff.
@nerdtronics@mstdn.starnix.network @peterk@social.tchncs.de
@Zergling_man
Well, yep! If you take a look at "Required by" section here: https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/main/x86/gnutls
It's quite a list: vlc, ffmpeg, most vnc clients, samba, cups… I mean you most certainly can avoid using that or build without gnutls, but why?
Not that something is intrinsically wrong with GNU. It's overrated by some, but I see no point in berating it either 🤷
@replikvlt @nerdtronics@mstdn.starnix.network @peterk@social.tchncs.de
It's designed for running in containers.
@Zergling_man
Yeah, I know what Alpine is. Even OpenWRT which is very barebones has some GNU components. Like I said, sure, you can avoid using anything GNU, but why? What is so wrong with it? 😄
Some stuff is fine, glibc is fine as there is no musl for i386, gcc is fine, binutils and gdb are fine — lots of software actually. Why jump through all the hoops to avoid it? It's nothing like systemd or pulseaudio or… insert your favourite bloatware.
@replikvlt @nerdtronics@mstdn.starnix.network @peterk@social.tchncs.de
