By these standards, most of my adult relatives are actually children.

I forget where I heard it from, but somebody said that it’s strange how we believe that if we go back in time and make a small change, it will have a huge effect on the future, but we also believe that making small changes today won’t make any difference in the future.

I love word ladders. Here’s one that I do every day, which even has a word ladder in the URL. https://wordwormdormdork.com/

For your second point, do you say that you use Adobe or Windows?

I mean, you already know the answer to that. The point is that you don’t have to give the entire context of your computing environment every time you mention some product you use.

Linux is just the kernel.

It’s not only the kernel. It is also the name that people have settled on for differentiating the computer running the Linux kernel from a computer running Windows.

I was contrasting it with the animal “gnu”, otherwise known as the wildebeest, which is pronounced more similar to the word “new”. I suspect more people know the animal gnu than know the organization GNU.

I understand why Stallman wanted us to say GNU/Linux, because his organization needs money and wants its name out there, but that’s simply not how things get named in the real world.

First, GNU was always a mouthful. It’s always been intentionally pronounced differently from the animal. People prefer names that are not confusing and that don’t sound strange.

Second, we don’t do the same thing for other operating systems. If you’re an illustrator, you don’t say that you work on Adobe/Windows or whatever.

Third, GNU/Linux adds nothing interesting over simply “Linux”. And in fact, there have been distributions where they avoid GNU tooling due. Everybody still recognizes these as Linux.

If anything, they feel more confident, unencumbered by experience or the truth.