Affectations are bad because they are self-consciously not genuine. Is Linux Unix? I may be wrong, but I am fairly certain it's not. If Linux entails a distinct mode of being from Unix, what does it mean to try to close the gap between the two? It's in that gap that I situate Arch and "The Arch Way" and all who endorse it. As for GNU is Not Unix, it literally means GNU is Not Unix. I am not saying GNU is contra-Unix; I am restating the gap between the two and Arch's elision thereof. As for Vim, I am not saying that choosing Vim over any other editor is a Unix affectation, but that the "legions of Vim users" as a whole assumes a different light before the background/scenario I have been sketching, one that isn't exactly aligned with GNU.Unix affectations are bad? Unix affectations make you anti-GNU? That's odd. GNU is not literally not Unix. That is, the name is famously a pun and the code is not at all shared, but the entire point of the early GNU tools was to provide a free and open set of Unix-like tools.
Unfortunately I have run up against this misunderstanding everywhere within the FLOSS community: for people who go out of there way to use FLO software for the freedom it offers, FLOSS users have a very strange understanding of ideology, and indeed think that free software is somehow outside ideology (I am not convinced you can ever be outside of ideology, which is neither here nor there, but I emphatically assure you FLOSS isn't). Ideology is not a bad thing and understanding that would probably make the matter a lot less confusing for the FLOSS community. Indeed, given the importance they give to their "Social Contract" or manifestos, choosing to use Debian and choosing to use Arch are about two of the most ideologically charged choices you can make in computing today, much more immediately so then using Ubuntu or Fedora or SUSE, etc., and perhaps somewhere below using OSX.Telemachus wrote: But I don't like seeing choices about software conflated with ideological positions. It bothers me on principle.
Again, the anti-GNU tag was a bit of a joke and is to be understood as shorthand for what I explained above.