the thing is that not all of them use systemd or bash or zsh or even X11 (servers don’t usually have X11 installed)

All of them use a Linux kernel and many components that were originally developed for GNU, especially the C library.

GTK being a part of GNU (at least originally)

“The OS” doesn’t exist. The operating systems you’re talking about are called Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, RHEL, etc etc. The main work of making an actually usable OS from the various free software components others have written has always been done by the teams responsible for these products.

But we still need a way to refer to them collectively, and it used to make sense to call them “Linux” because they were pretty much the only operating systems that used the Linux kernel, but now that Android is the most widely used OS on the planet, it doesn’t anymore, and this alone is a reason to say GNU/Linux unless you want to include Android.

stopthatgirl7 and reddfugee are two I remember seeing a few times.

I use Ghost Commander as a file manager on Android.

ahhh i remember being a bored teenager spending his life customizing his desktop too…

Nowadays I just want a working system where I can get things done, haven’t touched my desktop environment settings in a while and certainly don’t use things like cubes or wobbly windows anymore.

Beside everything else it is certainly nonfree proprietary software. I prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Neue

In the vast majority of countries, everything written down is automatically copyrighted by default and if you want to release it into the public domain or under a free license you have to make it explicit.

https://xkcd.com/1989/

I am too young for that, but I do remember discovering the concept of wikis and finding it amazing that websites could now be written by their audience.

A fairly dead concept by now, nowadays the entire rest of the Internet is more interesting than wikis.

We used to think that if we had user-generated content, we would all be immune to governments, corporations and other powerful actors spreading propaganda because we would get our information from each other, not them.

Turns out: governments, corporations, other powerful actors are perfectly capable of paying “users” to “generate content” and not even disclose this.

The Internet used to be an exciting development, now it’s just like, yeah it exists, so what.

Didn’t that happen a long time ago which is how we got MATE?

I no longer follow developments in GTK based DEs much because nowadays KDE Plasma is so clearly the best choice for me, but it has long been my impression that GNOME just wants to be its own thing that doesn’t really care about anyone not using GNOME. This is probably because the main role of GNOME is to be the DE for installations commercially supported by Canonical, Red Hat, etc.

Linux on an Intel-based MacBook Air was my daily driver for years. It worked perfectly fine; battery life was lower than on macOS though.

I used to not understand it either. Now I understand that for normal people, it is an RSS reader where you just get notified when the sources you follow have something to say. For celebrities and organizations it is an advertising platform where they can remind their followers of their existence and tell them what they are doing.

Since the 80’s, Linux has been using a display server called the X Window System

This is, of course, not true, given that Linux did not yet exist in the 1980s.

Unix-like systems that predate Linux did already use it in the 1980s.

Looking through the ones I have installed, I think these are useful to most people:

• AnySoftKeyboard
• Calculator++
• K-9 Mail
• Open Camera
• Orbot
• OsmAnd~
• VLC

by default yes, this can be changed back though

To my knowledge, FreeDOS has been a fairly complete implementation of DOS for a very long time, so this is probably not useful to them.

Because DOS and later Windows used to be the only OS that was relevant for IBM PC compatible systems. Only later were eg. Unix-like systems developed for them.

Something like that already exists, look up Freedom Phone