Not that I agree with RMS's naming insistence, but you cannot refer to the kernel as 'the operative system'. The C toolchain is the tip of the iceberg, there's

Not that I agree with RMS's naming insistence, but you cannot refer to the kernel as 'the operative system'. The C toolchain is the tip of the iceberg, there's X, multiple desktop environments, the core utils, VMs and programming language interpreters, etc. They all ship in your operative system, and just to put it in perspective, even open/libre office alone represents a larger bulk of code than the kernel. I'm fine with the name 'linux'. But we should indeed acknowledge that we call it Linux mostly for historical reasons, not because it's the most fair name.