I used to think like that, but now I’m on the fence since I’ve started working much more closely with packaging. Calling it “linux” is actually kind of harmful for adoption. Devs that claim their software works on Linux mislead people into thinking it works on any Linux distro, which is rarely true. Most of the time, those devs only test on Ubuntu and no other distro.
Maybe when Snaps finally die out and Flatpak emerges as the one true standard for desktop apps, then that problem will go away once and for all. Until then, I think we should normalize distinguishing Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc as separate “operating systems” instead of “distros”, which is an unnecessary and misleading term anyways.
I used to think like that, but now I’m on the fence since I’ve started working much more closely with packaging. Calling it “linux” is actually kind of harmful for adoption. Devs that claim their software works on Linux mislead people into thinking it works on any Linux distro, which is rarely true. Most of the time, those devs only test on Ubuntu and no other distro.
Maybe when Snaps finally die out and Flatpak emerges as the one true standard for desktop apps, then that problem will go away once and for all. Until then, I think we should normalize distinguishing Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc as separate “operating systems” instead of “distros”, which is an unnecessary and misleading term anyways.