GNU wasn't mistaken for Unix though, it was made as a piece-by-piece foss replacement for all the proprietary Unix tools. Everything about this meme is wrong!
Absolutely. Gnu was made to be specifically different from Unix which was becoming locked down by AT&T copyrights. Gnu wasn't Unix, and therefore still isn't.
More semantically than some other answers, GNU software is generally on Linux computers, so if GNL was Not Linux, than it would be even more confusing for it to be on a Linux computer.
I think if you need to make the destiction, GNU+Linux is probably the best option for the whole software set and kernel included and if you want to talk about the operating system, I think naming your distribution and following it up with "a distribution of Linux" would be the most accurate, if you are in a situation where accuracy counts.
Okay but for more clarity sake. LINUX IS NOT UNIX. I don’t care how many certifications or random university teachers mix the two up, they’re wrong.
Linux has only one bit of history with Unix and that is the fact it was made because there was no easily accessible Unix source code for Linus and other students to use. Linus made a Unix-like os. Hence Lin-ux. But it’s not Unix. It doesn’t use any Unix source code. It’s not based on System V or any other official Unix version. Linux is Unix in name only. Its POSIX compliant and has a few POSIX certified distros, but it’s not Unix.
This fact is what made it so favorable to devs worldwide. Unix having his history as a proprietary operating system with a confusing license situation where AT&T would seemingly go sue happy at random made Unix scary and unfavorable.
Linux was built from the ground up. It had no such history. If Linux were Unix this couldn’t possibly have been true, and it certainly wouldn’t have gone on to take over the server and smart phone markets.
YAML will be granted a grace period as a recursive acronym, but as punishment they must remove the questionable contraction and will henceforth be YANML.