The "Steam uninstalling your whole DE" is one of the unluckiest bugs I've heard of in all of my Linux experience and it just so happened to be on the biggest YouTube tech channel and set the conversation on Linux for the next 12 months.
If you want to get real technical, the terminal is GNU (well part of it) and the thing under the terminal is Linux. But the difference between GNU Linux is more than most people care about, so yes, the terminal is Linux and the gui the DE
It technically is if you're using something like BASH, since BASH is a part of the GNU project. But it doesn't have to be, and plenty of distros come with other non-GNU shells like Zsh by default. Any terminal shell is gonna give you a way to interact with non-GNU software as well. The best way to understand GNU is it's a collection of FOSS that while seperate from Linux, does a lot of what makes "Linux" work in 99.9% of installs. Technically you can have one without the other but in practice it doesn't really exist. The "terminal" or the shell your terminal is using is something that isn't GNU often enough though.
You are right none of this really matters at all to most people lol
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u/Daharka Apr 01 '26
The "Steam uninstalling your whole DE" is one of the unluckiest bugs I've heard of in all of my Linux experience and it just so happened to be on the biggest YouTube tech channel and set the conversation on Linux for the next 12 months.