Apart from being open source what is Linux? Could I not create my own operating system that is different to windows or Macos and call it Steve, again there might be an awnser for this and sounds stupid but its more out of curiosity.
You can 100% create your own kernel for an operating system, and call it Steve
Sounds perfect… Just disappointed that Steve os has not been released :/ I can hope though!
You can 100% create your own kernel for an operating system, and call it Steve
But would it be in honor of Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, or Steve Seagal?
Hypothetically, could a guy called Linus create his own kernel and name it after himself?
The kernel. It’s why the BSD distros for example, while very similar to Linux, aren’t “Linux”.
Mr. Stallman would be angry if you didn’t define it as the Linux kernel plus the GNU stuff that you need to do things with the kernel.
Kernel + environment = OS
The GNU+Linux thing is dumb. First, the GNU userspace programs aren’t the only things added to the kernel to make a working OS. A more fitting name would be systemd+Xorg+PipeWire+Linux. Second, not all Linux distributions use GNU’s programs. Some use Busybox, such as Android. Some don’t even use GNU’s libc, but musl. On an entirely headless system running completely unattended, you could probably not have any userspace at all. Finally, the GNU programs aren’t used at all by the average Joe who only uses their computer for Web browsing, emails and games.
Kernel = OS. Tools is what makes the OS actually useful, but strictly speaking they’re not needed.
Linux is the kernel; that is, the core of the operating system, which handles memory, hardware, inputs… Every OS has one. Windows’ is called NT, macOS’ is called Darwin.
You don’t use the kernel, you use the OS. Linux is special because there several operating systems based on Linux; they are called distributions, and they are what you want to use.
You can create your own Linux distribution, by bundling various software packages with the kernel, in a way that caters to specific needs or follows a philosophy (for example, Linux Mint is a distribution focused on ease of use, Archlinux on minimalism…). This is not possible with Windows because their kernel is not licensed under terms which would allow this. It is with Darwin, but unusual.
You can also create your own kernel but this is extremely hard. Getting the computer to boot is easy enough (relatively speaking), but getting programs to run and things to display is much harder. Getting your custom kernel to a usable state is orders of magnitude harder, as it needs to work on and communicate with modern hardware and networks. Linux took more than 30 years of development by thousands of developers (some of them highly talented in a very narrow field of computing) to get to the level it’s at.
“Linux” is the name of the OS kernel — the component that manages hardware drivers, schedules processes, provides basic networking operations, and so on. The project that builds that particular kernel was started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds.
However, that kernel is almost always used with an assortment of libraries, utilities, and user-interfaces (such as the bash shell) which are often expected to be part of a “Linux system”. Many of these come from the GNU project, which began separately from the Linux kernel as an effort to make a free Unix clone.
When the libraries etc. are the ones from the GNU project — e.g. the C library glibc — we can call the system “GNU/Linux” which is a term used by Debian and some other software distributions.
