GNUless November: a month without GNU.

This November, challenge yourself to live without GNU for a month.

About the Challenge

GNULess November is a fairly simple challenge to understand:

  1. On November 1st, uninstall any GNU software (e.g. gcc, coreutils) from your system. You may want to install a special GNUless distro such as Alpine.
  2. Use your newly GNUless system as your daily driver for a whole month.
  3. On November 31st, you can reinstall your GNU tools/switch back to your GNU/Linux distro (or don't! If you find that you prefer to not use GNU, then keep it that way.)

Purpose

The most accurate way to honestly describe the purpose of this challenge is that my friends and I thought it sounded cool, so we made it into a thing.

That being said, doing this challenge could have actual interesting results. We wanted to see just how much GNU software actually matters in day-to-day usage (especially considering that a lot of people call Linux GNU/Linux) and whether non-GNU alternatives actually worked better. So by undertaking this challenge, you can both increase your knowledge of how your distro/OS works (by identifying GNU components) and experiment to see if a non-GNU workflow fits better!


Note that this challenge is not meant to antagonize GNU and the FSF in any way. It's purely a challenge to see how much GNU software you use on a daily basis and how it would feel to get rid of/replace these components.

Ready to get started?

Take a look at our Gitlab repo for some tips on getting started.