Captain Beyond

Librewolf mainly because that’s the Firefox-type browser that comes with my distro (IceCat is there too, but it’s based on ESR and not frequently updated).

Sure if your hardware works to your satisfaction with it. The only way to know is to try it yourself. You can test it with a Trisquel liveusb.

Codium is fine and technically FOSS although it’s association with Microsoft taints it for anyone who still hates MS from the bad old days.

“New” Microsoft isn’t really any better, and although Codium itself is perfectly fine (Electron notwithstanding) many of Microsoft’s extensions only work with/are only licensed for the official VSCode build and include proprietary parts.

One of my professors said you don’t need an IDE, the Linux system already is a development environment.

Considering “the Linux system” is literally anything you throw on top of the kernel called Linux, it can be a development environment or anything you want it to be. But I think part of the appeal of an IDE is how all the parts integrate (the “I” in “IDE”) so a bunch of packages thrown together might not provide the same cohesive feeling.

I don’t know if grouping disparate projects under the “community” label has any worthwhile benefit. Given the label is meant to classify related operating systems, the label should provide an accurate description of the basis of the system. A simpler solution would be to just say GNU/Linux is a subcategory of Linux (and maybe even sub-sub-categorize by package manager or init system or whatever makes the most sense). Similarly, I think Android and its derivatives are worthy of being its own classification of Linux operating system (as long as you don’t try to claim “it’s not real Linux” or whatever).

With regards to software compatibility, I think it’s rather the other way around - software written for “Linux” usually works on any POSIX operating system, and sometimes even Windows. Unless you’re talking about binary compatibility, which is meaningless in the Linux space anyway.

Why not also recognize systemd, or musl, or kde or gnome or any of the other millions of non GNU packages that are needed to make up a complete OS.

Unironically there might be some value in recognizing “systemd/Linux” as a subfamily of Linux operating systems.

And these days GNU makes up less and less of the core packages that most distros run anymore.

Linux makes up exactly one package on a so-called Linux system.