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Interesting, thanks for the answers! Still, to me, this is as close to a Linux distribution as macOS.

But yeah I'd like to learn more about Android. Unfortunately I haven't found documentation that got me started. Maybe it is there, but when searching about Android, I tend to get the Android SDK, not Android-as-an-OS stuff.

If you have any resources to share then, it would be nice :-).



Here is the documentation for AOSP:

https://source.android.com/docs

There are also some books about Android's internals, but they are somewhat outdated.

One such book is Android Security Internals and is about Android KitKat (2014). Android has evolved since then, but the basic concepts are the same.

https://ia600608.us.archive.org/29/items/android-internals/a...

If you want fully up to date information about something not in the official docs you will probably just have to dig in to the source code.

https://cs.android.com/


There's no denying the userland's different, there's just this notion where one's called GNU/Linux and the other ART/Linux (Android RunTime) but the thing they share in common is the Linux kernel, hence the name.


Sure. Yeah I guess it's not very important. But since we're here :-)...

My point was really that if I you say "I work on a Linux distribution", I think about something like Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/... I could be pedantic and say "oh, is that a GNU/Linux distribution?", to which you could answer "nope, it's Alpine". And then we could debate on exactly what is required to call it "GNU/Linux" and not "something-else/Linux".

If now you showed me your computer running Android, I would honestly be very surprised. Why didn't you say "Android" instead of "a Linux distribution"?

If you tell me "I run Linux", I won't say "oh, do you not run a userland then?" either. Linux is a kernel, but it is also the name commonly given to a group of OSes that are very similar (and that are commonly referred to as "Linux distributions"). Android is not part of that group.




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