Yes, people often use terms in a misleading way, because they make up their own definition, or because they follow a convention or habit, which may be wrong. People often say America when they refer to the USA, which is plain wrong. America is a continent, not a nation, a country or a collection of states.

For some reason there is the distinction between kernel, system software and applications to keep things apart.

The kernel alone makes no operating system. An operating system is the functional unit comprised by the kernel and the system software. Period. In that sense referring to Linux as an operating system is wrong: an operating system with the Linux kernel is called more accurately Linux/GNU (or GNU/Linux, there's also GNU/Hurd), since the kernel is called Linux, and the system software is GNU.

OTOH it can be debated whether the different Linux distributions (Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, RedHat, SuSE to name a few) differ so much in their system software that their respective undelying OS may be called an own distinct operating system. Since they ship oodles of applications, some of which are tightly integrated into the system software via dependencies, they are distributions.

IMHO the *BSD variants show that distinction best: there's the kernel and the system software in a minimal install. All else lives in the ports tree.

--shmem 

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

In reply to Re^3: (OT) command for finding out which distribution of Linux is being used by shmem
in thread (OT) command for finding out which distribution of Linux is being used by heidi

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