Android Authority Doesn't Understand Linux or Android 

So, the point the author of the article made is, that android is a linux distro, but a very annoying one? :D As a long time linux user I have to agree.

One thing that got brushed over; Custom Android ROMS. Graphene, Lineage, and /e/OS are all Android Distros that strip out a lot of the proprietary software, pulling it more in line with the philosophy of Linux. On top of that, they aren't using the Android name, but some include it in their websites and assets, which means the point AA made about being forced to liaison the Android name from Google is either diminished or can otherwise be easily sidestepped.

I can't help mentally replacing every time you say "authority" with Cartman saying "Authoritah"

This reads like it was written by someone who's never actually used Linux and just spent 15 minutes reading about it on Wikipedia

I would like to share my $0.02, as a developer of an Android-x86 based distro, I would say that Android is just an immutable Linux distro with it's own custom selinux rules, hardware definitions, compositor, and user access control. Various members of BlissLabs have spent years on Bliss OS, Maru OS, and most recently Waydroid, trying to blur the lines between Linux and Android as much as possible, and this video points out that we could still be doing a better job at educating the public on the differences. Thanks for the shoutout to Waydroid BTW ;)

The article has a 5 year old video embedded in it by Gary Sims that explains the similarities and differences between Android and Linux. Ironically, the author of the article did not watch the video. The author states "by default you cannot run Android apps on any platform other than Android." In the embeded video, Gary Sims explicitly states that Chrome OS can run Android apps. Also, Windows 11 includes the Windows Subsystem for Android that can run Android apps in Windows. According to the author's argument then, Android is actually Windows.

I used to follow a lot of Linux development years ago, including engaging on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Later when custom Android development became a thing, on sites like xda-developers, I tried to follow and participate as well. Frankly I found the differences in culture and approach tough to deal with and ultimately I lost interest. Things like custom ROMs being assembled by anonymous devs known only by their screen name just felt weird to me. Yes, there are Linux devs who work anonymously or who go by an online username, but Android always felt way more "black-box" to me, even with projects outside of Google.

ai-generated article

My notes: 1. "Android doesn't use the standard kernel distros use." IIRC most modifications Google makes to Linux is some changes to power management, process scheduling and how the OOM killer works. That's relatively minor stuff. 2. "You cannot run Linux app on Android and viceversa." This is his strongest point, imho. If we consider an OS as the sum of the kernel and the userland frameworks and components, then a dramatically different userland like Android's in comparison to desktop Linux would then make them different OSes. It would be like arguing if the PS3, 4 and 5 OSes are distros of FreeBSD or not. They are based on FreeBSD, but they have so wildly different userlands and system call interfaces that they are effectively different OSes. 2.1 And even then, every single Android device ships with the bog-standard Busybox from traditional Linux distros AFAIK. You can run it with any terminal emulator for Android, or even with the ABD debug shell, no Termux needed. And that Busybox can launch any shell script or command line app that can be compiled with the NDK, which is bog-standard gcc for ARM under the hood! 3. "Android is a Google product." This one is so nonsensical I can't even! That's like saying that since most cars are made by big transnational corporations, then that DIY go-kart you built in your garage is not a kind of car at all because no big corpo had anything to do with it's construction. I don't even know where to start. 4. "Android's FOSS status is up for debate." Linspire was also heavily propietary and no one disputes that it was a Linux distro, for example. This one is quite a reach. 5. "You cannot customize Android by default." In that sense, then you could argue that un-activated Windows is not Windows because you can't customize it either. Also, using "customize" as a synonym for "rooting" is quite an egregious abuse of notation if you ask me.

"You need to root your device if you want to customize it" Me deleting system apps with adb shell and universal android debloater(basically a gui for adb shell)

I know you generally touched on this from a technical perspective but i've always found the whole debate moot because practically none of the huge android userbase even know what linux is or care about it. They don't participate in the broader ecosystem, do not care that you can run terminal apps and definitely won't be considering to use it as a desktop os on their pc. Same thing with Chrome os.

Being the devil's attorney, android indeed have some changes that actually affects userspace in the shell. For example, the kernel has some "builtin" groups to allow the user to something that would be trivial in a "desktop" version of the kernel, and its not like normal groups and then you just change the group of the device file, its actually internal permissions to allow certain features of the kernel to be used, e.g. you cannot open sockets even in a separate namespace or even in local context with socketpair(), i know that because i had this problem with a container that i've made with root permissions, i had to map the groups and assign them for all users (even for the root) in the namespace to allow socket creation.

I was (a small) part of the CyanogenMOD development back in the day, just like the writer of this article can have no idea what they are saying and still be called a writer, all the items in the article make Android a bad Linux distro (from a free software and software ecosystem POV), but being bad at something doesn't make you something else. The most absurd thing, that none of the arguments that may be valid against the definition of Android as a Linux distro, are not in the article.

Think about a Enterprise distro with strict policies in place and proper account speration, where a user cannot access root , but also every apps are running in a CHROOT env or in a docker container.... seems like a android to me

To be fair rooting on Android is practically injecting a daemonized rootkit to the system boot chain so it's pretty different. Though the concepts still pretty much map between Freedesktop Linux (that's what I'm going to call it from now on) and Android.

Apart from Termux, there's also X servers on the Play Store, which you can use along things like UserLAnd to basically run whatever distribution you want. Android is a Linux distribution the same Debian/Fedora/Arch/Alpine are. They're all a distribution of software running on top of the Linux kernel. They just ship wildly different software by default. Them there's the Steam Deck. You also don't have root on that by default thanks to the immutable filesystem. It's awefully similar to Android's `/system` and `/data` partition design... It does include KDE, but even if it didn't, it'd still be called Linux. And yet it has its own display server (gamescope), its own UI (Steam client). Is my router not Linux because it uses BusyBox and doesn't come with SSH by default? Heck, there's even Linux servers with no userspace, they boot directly to a single Go application via gokrazy. Or servers that boot directly to Docker. Linux is the kernel, and if it uses the Linux kernel, it's Linux.

Android isn't POSIX standard compliant. I think that's a big difference and probably the main one. As a final note, i don't see virtualization, containerization and emulation arguments for or against system differenciation because all of them can exist in both systems.

No way people still watch their videos or read their articles💀

The ChromeOS's kernel diverges more from mainline than Android's lmfao ChromeOS has all of Android's patches because Android emulation on ChromeOS is basically a Android chroot, but ChromeOS also uses it's own swap manager called kstaled instead of kswapd and it has a modified KVM. Of course ChromeOS is still crap, But it does diverge more from mainline.

Sometimes it certainly feels like these sites only exist in order to have a "thing" somebody can show adds on.

I wish there was a project that basically ran in parallel to AOSP controlled by the many android rom developers that gave users what they want instead of forced changes such as massive notification buttons at the mercy of google I wish the community just got together and made it work. That would be a sight to behold

Article: you can not run Linux apps on Android. Me: literally doing just that. Not even in Termux, but in the real system. Simply use busybox/musl versions of software (i.e. statically linked binaries). In fact you totally can chroot into other Linux distro.

I think most of the arguments were terrible, but in the end he might have a point. In particular: - Little to no GNU software. This one is highly debatable, but to me it's the terminology - Android is absolutely a Linux-based OS, but I don't think I'd call it a Linux distro. I think the term "Linux distro" implies certain things, one of which is GNU tooling. Yeah, you could use musl and busybox and tcsh and whatever else, but that's extremely niche. Nobody does that. - The closed-source software is a better argument IMO. Yes, every usable Linux distro will have some binary blobs to run the hardware. Most gamers are going to install Steam (or maybe it comes preinstalled). That doesn't make it not a Linux distro. But I do think Android goes well beyond that. I think if you consider Android as a Linux distro, then MacOS is just a flavor of FreeBSD. I don't agree with that.

"You cannot run Linux apps in Android" Me who started using Doom Emacs, because I needed an extendable editor on my tablet for school, and since VScode wasn't an option and there were no adequate apps, forcing me to use it through termux: °_°

This feels like the same debate people might have over “is ChromeOS a Linux distro?” The arguments against it have get mired in rebuttals, just like what happened here.

So Android isn't GNU/Linux due to lack of the GNU part. It's Android/Linux. But that's like calling my Kubuntu KDE/Linux if I never open the terminal. Things get ridiculous quickly.

16:13 to be fair, its not like all android users also use linux on their desktop to know what it means. they just know that this process allows them to do some funky stuff and that its just called "rooting". they know the rough equivalent for iphones is "jailbreaking" but thats as far as theyre told, and unless they become linux users themselves or have someone else tell them otherwise, theyre gonna keep thinking what theyre thinking. we dont know what we dont know that being said, the writer absolutely shouldve done more research on this topic.

Sound argument👍 Glad to hear it!

I wish android was more linux, termux works suprisingly well when you realize how hacky the whole project is cause google makes it harder and harder to make it more linuxy by locking it down further

4:22 this section of the article was clearly written by richard stallman

I thought I saw ages back an article or RU-vid video that basically said that Google was removing all traces of the word "Linux" from the Android website. Like regardless of the software components being used, the linux kernal, they wish to distance themselves from the Linux community and from Technology that isn't of their own making and which they control. So philosophically, is Google Android really Linux when they are fundamentally going to astronomical lengths to try not to be? And certainly when Android doesn't function as a typical Linux distro does (for comparison the Steam Deck is again, highly locked down version of Linux but you can see that it still allows for more freedom than Google permits)? Like, is the Playstation OS actually BSD or it's own creation separate from the components used??

I'm convinced it was written by GPT-4

Most alterations to the Linux kernel that typical phones use are tons of crap and duct tape that vendors quickly stitch together to get their device out there

"You cannot run Linux apps on Android" *laughs in UserLAnd*

This article demonstrates that asking if Android is Linux is like asking if the Balrog has wings.

I think what the writer tried here is to make Linux more understandable to the casual user that is perfectly fine just having an Android device as their primary computing device. What the Linux community lacks of is empathy and the will to make things actually easy to understand to outsiders. Neither of these factors is wrong or right as there is good reason for Linux users to keep terminology consistent yet also is it a fact that the Android ecosystem first and foremost is meant to consume content and stay in contact with people rather than doing productive work for the most part. It'd be the best from the authors perspective to involve a Linux community dev or someone similar who has enough foresight as to understand that not everyone is an enthusiastic person that knows exactly where on the file system each file sits.

I started sighing at the exact same time that you did. .. and then laughed about it. thought it was super funny that we had the same reaction .

Me, watching this in an Alpine Linux, trying to be convinced that Android is not Linux because it's not a GNU/Linux. OMG. Fun thing is that I literally knew what you were going to say for every point, haha. You were reading and I was shouting (in my head): What about Alpine? Chimera? Termux anyone? Jesus, what a bad article!

There's a bit that he talked about car "radios" that use Linux and I'm kinda want a video about WRLinux/wind river linux

I really like your content man

There's Krita on F-Droid. Hard to use without mouse and keyboard on OTG cable because of the tiny buttons but you can run full Linux software on Android.

It's closer to a weird embedded system then a proper desktop/server distribution. Expect something like a shitty router with no real documentation, just marketing BS at best. So if you consider any other embedded system Linux Android is Linux. "You cannot run Linux apps on Android." This one gave me an aneurysm from stupidity. Yes, you can, I used the regular Debian ARM stuff to compile and run c++ stuff. Of course we are still in the weird embedded system realm so you might have to compile a lot of stuff you usually take for granted too.

If something has to call itself "authority", it isn't.

Please note that Asahi Linux is also merging their changes into regular Linux

It's like saying cheese isn't a dairy product because it's made of whey instead of using "standard milk"

was that article created in the 1st april ??? joking asside i know a few people that say that android has nothing to do with linux, but none ever used linux in their liffe, i just agree with them and move on...it's better than irritate myself with those kind of fact denials.

Would you say root is the root word of rooting?

Best argument for Android being Linux is just the fact that you need a kernel with Binder IPC (e.g linux-zen on Arch) and some userspace binaries and you can run Android on top of Linux desktop, no emulation or virtualization required...

The Article is trash. Google Bad. Android is a Linux-based OS with design principles that alter or are unique from the usual, it's still Linux just not a traditional Linux distribution. I like to refer to Android as an independent flavor of Linux.

I feel like Gary is starting to lose touch with reality. He got a little unhinged about a comment I made on video he made about ARM vs RISC-V. I get the sense that he's a bit of a legend in his own mind.

Note that it's not even JUST the corpo led linux distributrions that are trademarked. The Linux Mint name and associated artwork are also trademarked/copyrighted for example as I suspect a number of other distros are. No self-respecting group is going to just let someone literally call their fork the exact same name and rip their artwork and pretend to be them, it's a security risk if nothing else.

The most annoying aspect of Android is the number of devices that contain drivers which the manufacturer hasn't released the source code for, thereby breaking the Linux kernel licensing agreement. This isn't a problem with Android itself, just the immorality of some of the device vendors.

So, the only point he successfully made was that Linux is not Android. That's not equivalent to saying that Android is not Linux.

I thought it was called rooting cos it's the closest you can get to have intimate relations with your device...

Android is a toolkit written in Java and Javascript on top of a specialized Linux kernel. Android is the interface, Linux is the kernel. Why is this a discussion? The kernel was originally pulled from Linus.

My main argument as to why Android is a LINO (Linux In Name Only): Android is a virtual runtime platform that can work on many different underlying kernels. Linux is not an integral part of Android, see Fuschia efforts to move from Linux to a microkernel. That does bring a fun question though; is Debian GNU/Hurd a Linux distribution too?

I would call android Linux, but a weird flavor of Linux since it doesn't allow you to set the root password yourself and that gaining system level access is a mess compared to Linux... Rooting, come on and that is literally "su -" or "sudo bash" to open up a "rooted" shell... Honestly I didn't realize it because this is not a thing I think about like ever..... Since the way you use a phone is way different than you use a desktop/laptop. For my phone I'm happy that it just works, not that it work in exactly the way I want. I just want something that is stable enough and does what I need it to do (and doesn't actively get in my way (cough Huawei/Xiaomi skins cough))

The whole article could be summed up as "LINUX RUN ON COMPUTAH BUT ANDROID ON PHONE?!?! IS NOT SAME?!?!"

This article.. makes you think about Linux and society..

before the section "android doesn't use the standard linux kernel" there is the sentence "… let's look at a few reasons why you might think the two aren't similar" i guess you have overlooked the narrative why they brought this up

That article was like political debate ignore all the facts you don't like to support a false argument. Yes if you ignore what linux distro is then yes android isn't linux and IOS isn't unix.

15:32 another example you can give here is fedora silverblue. Fedora Silverblue is still a Linux distro, but you can't just edit root sepcific stuff "by default". By 'by default' it means any end user who uses GUI can't just do that stuff.

The last one was painful xD

I have to be honest, I don't see Android as a Linux Distro. I see it as an operating environment running on top of Linux that could just as easily switch to a different base (say, Fuschia or FreeBSD) To me, to say that Android is Lnux is like saying that MacOS or Sony's OS for the Playstation are FreeBSD. For me there's more than enough separation between the two environments to consider them different operating systems rather than distributions of the same OS. Termux and Waydroid (or Anbox) are bridges between the two environments IMHO but in my mind, Linux and Android are not the same thing.

Lol you never opened that changes tab xd Granted that page is 7 years old :p

I just have to see "Gary Explains" in the background and then I just switch off anyway.

rooting on android is actually not an exploit these days. You can unlock the bootloader on most devices. Actually the main reason you can't root on android is because the super user binary is missing.

actually, Xorg is not used on android (they use custom java (?) stuff instead)

Fine, so they want one of us to do a decompile on an Android image and do a binary comparison with Linux.

in my view, its a bit like asking if freebsd is the original berkley system unix. well is it? ... no, buut it is definately a very familiar feeling offspring that carries across may cultural cues to be found in that project. as a continuation of the parent project. so let me ask you another question... is c++ the same thing as c99 ? well no, there are indeed some substantial differences. however there is certainly a significant amount of overllap. and the 2 languages end up keeping a considerable subset of interoperability and cross compatibility. so here is my 3rd question: why is it that nobody actually is stupid enough out there to make any kind of a sort of a fuss about any of those other project, but a huge amount of people make a massive amount of fuss about andoid and linux? why is that? culturally speaking? or for other specific reason(s)? i suppose what i am really getting at is: why is there such a requirement to have a binary black and white yes/no binary answer to the question? has nobody heard of the following term: the world is never black and white, it is always shades of grey. there are a multitude of ways a person could frame or describe the relationship between these 2 projects... so where is the reason for creating some weird artificial controversies over this? ... because in my view they are utterly weird and artificial. as i have explained recently before, the main definition to distinguish an os compatible "platform" is general around being able to natively run binaries and apps without having to resort to recompile / cross compile / emulation / translation. it is a nuanced matter, but not a totally un-explain-able one.

Typing sodo and your password is definitely not in the same supercluster as hacking your device with a exploit with the chance of bricking it while voiding warranty and braking the law of some countries.

Seems like he is confused about his own question. Android is an operating system that distributes a modified Linux Kernel. There is nothing to write long posts about it. Is it compatible to a GNU+Linux desktop operating system? No. Is it required to be in order for being a Linux distribution? No. There are plenty of Linux distributions which are not compatible to each other.

6:48 I think this poorly worded sentence actually is trying to say, "If you picked several Linux distros at random, then chances are that the Linux kernel would be the only software component they have in common with Android." Meaning, the author thinks that Android is 100% custom software outside of the kernel. Otherwise, this sentence makes no sense and isn't even relevant to the article.

"linux is open source, and android is technically open source, but it FEEEELS closed source ya know?"

When you strip down everything they got wrong and consider their own admissions they actually made a rather convincing argument that android is linux. Opps.

this article was a very old one. i remember i read that one some years ago. really.

"if you agree that GNU software is a defining characteristic of a Linux distro, to the point where we should all be referring to Linux distros as Gnu/Linux" wtf does that mean, people refer to GNU/Linux SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE they want to draw a DISTINCTION between the linux kernel and GNU software

how do I upload my "Twitter reaction" folder to RU-vid comments

Wait this video is from March 15?

Android is Linux. That article said so. Then they claimed it said something it didn't. The article must have been written by a sociology major.

Think the guy was going for word count.

I root my linux every time I update :P

Gary was the good thing from Android Authority, his video is shared in the article lol

Probably just Saying Whatb Google wants them to say since the Mainstream Perception of Linux is that its not user Friendly.

i can write a file of 0s with dd if=/dev/zero of=filename bs=1M count=10 because of the zero file on linux, android also has that file, ergo android is linux (in my, naive, mine)

in the early days of Android, it didn't use the full Linux kernel. They adopted the full Linux kernel later on. And in 2021 Google changed the kernel to their own in house fork of the Linux Kernel called the ACK kernel ( Android Common Kernel ) and then they layer micro-kernels on top of that. the Vender kernel, the OEM Device kernel, and the HAL. In this case, the actual "Linux" kernel s the most insignificant component of the stack. It can easily be replaced without effecting the operation of the OS Which google is actually working on right now as a matter of fact. It started as part of the Fuchsia project but it now rolling into main-line android. So... is Android Linux? Ummmm..... Not really, and even if you think it is. That core kernel is being replaced sometime in the future according to Google to eliminate all this extra fragmentation and bloat within the OS structure. This will improve performance, and battery life as well as security and also gives Google full control over the kernel. At least that's the rumor.

I chrooted ubuntu's userland on my none rooted google pixel 6, installed java 17 from ubuntu's repos and downloaded a modded fabric minecraft server -Xmx3g... for me android is just a heavily locked down flavor of Linux also, the server ran much better than expected as long as you give termux unrestricted battery use and use usb-c ethernet.

Android can't run any AppImage and Shell Scripts ( Meant For Linux in General), and if you don't have GNU Libraries you can't even put them. The only thing that make Android Linux is only the kernel.

Android is Linux, not GNU/Linux but Linux. Android/Linux.

Here me out. It's android/linux

I don't think debating what is Linux and what not is very helpful in the long run. Just carry on and stop the drama.

Does Android have to be open source to call it Linux distro?

I shouldn't watch these videos before bed, they infuriate me (bc of the article, not your great content 😄)

Most Average Android Article.

oh so thats why there is pkg package manager

Theres also RedStar OS by democratic Koreas government.

I run Android Apps on Arch without VM.

Android is Linux but probably not the best representative of it. I deleted everything Google related on my Sony Xperia phone not from AOSP.

Based on a Gary explains 🤷

W...was this author drinking? He LITERALLY said the linux kernel, not GNU/Linux as a platform Proves that the author does not know what gnu was, OR they are just surface level linux newbies