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Aatube ,
Aatube avatar

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/?ref=itsfoss.com#section-most-popular-technologies-operating-system says for developers: Ubuntu, then WSL, then Debian, then everything else, then Arch, then...

Android also has personal use that ranks higher than WSL but professional use that ranks a tiny bit higher than Debian. Not sure if it's a Linux distro, but it's tangential.

boredsquirrel , (edited )

Android, ChromeOS, Coreboot, WSL2 are all Linux Distros

Aatube ,
Aatube avatar

IDK about Coreboot, but Android has a completely different userland. The only thing it has in common with Linux is the kernel. Nearly everything else is different. Everything else I agree, but only if you mean WSL2, which is basically an enhanced virtual machine, instead of WSL1, which translates system calls to Windows.

lemmyreader ,

IDK about Coreboot, but Android has a completely different userland. The only thing it has in common with Linux is the kernel.

Completely different ? How so ? Last time I did an adb shell I could use ls and find afair.

Aatube ,
Aatube avatar

Maybe I exaggerated, but what I meant is that Android lacks many ubiquitous components of Linux distros. For more information you can read https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/02/an-introduction-to-google-android-for-developers/.

boredsquirrel ,

Android is Linux+Stuff so it is a linux Distro XD

Aatube ,
Aatube avatar

Not in my book.

(source: me book)

The differences said in the link above cause a drastically different developer & user experience.

technom ,

There are two components that define a Linux distribution. The first is the kernel. The other is the core user land that includes the coreutils and libc. This part is made of GNU coreutils and glibc or compatible alternatives like busybox and musl. Every Linux distro has this. The other user land software stack are also similar across distributions, like X/Wayland, QT/GTK, dbus, XDG, etc.

In Android, everything in the user land is different. It doesn't have the same coreutils or libc unless you install it. ls and find are so common across *nixes that Android coreutils may be reimplementing it. Then you have APKs, surfaceflinger, etc that are not part of regular Linux distros.

An easy test for this is to see if a Linux program compiled for your platform runs on your OS. Linux programs easily run on alternative distros. But Linux programs won't run on Android or vice-versa, unless you install a compatibility layer.

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