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GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
- p0w3n3d 1mo agoWow.
- sirsinsalot 1mo agoI hope Hurd has its day. Maybe in 100 years or something.
- lynx97 1mo agoHurd will have its day once Linux makes it on the desktop :-)
- pjmlp 1mo agoLinux has made it to the desktop, packaged inside VMs served by Apple, Microsoft and Google.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- NoImmatureAdHom 1mo agoIt just...has made it. Plenty of power users just use it as their primary OS. I think official figures under-estimate it because many people daily-driving will spoof user agents of other OSes. And there's Android.
- pjmlp 1mo agoAh, Android, with a userspace based on Java, Kotlin, C and C++ standard libraries, Android native APIs, without anything related to GNU/Linux, unless it is a rooted device, or one gets to package a full Linux userspace as an APK, which isn't fully compatible due to security enforcement mechanisms. I would look into those statistics regarding desktop world wide adoption, distribution per OS.
- jhbadger 1mo agoAnyone who wants it can have Termux which gives you a full Linux experience under Android with GNU tools if you want it, though.
- vkazanov 1mo agoOh come on. :-) Linux is not userspace. Linux is a kernel, and android is a parallel fork of the kernel. So android is a version of linux but is not GNU/Linux. Android/Linux, if you will. We dont have to be shy this.
- pjmlp 1mo agoYeah, exactly because of that, lets not do victory laps for a kernel. GNU/Linux, the Linux desktop, has zero relevance on Android. No one, not a single person, buying Android tablets and phones at places like MediaMarkt, cares about GNU/Linux Desktop. They care about what apps via PlayStore, Samsung, Huawei and Xiomi stores, they can use, just like all normies.
- soperj 1mo agoPeople using Linux in 1992 would say something similar to people using any of the current flavours of Linux.
- pjmlp 1mo ago
- metalliqaz 1mo agoThat's not really what everyone means. However the recent success of gaming-related distros such as SteamOS and Bazzite seem to be succeeding where Usability-focused distros such as Mint, Pop!, and Zorin couldn't get deep traction
- inigyou 1mo agoThis should be a lesson about providing a product versus providing a technology. Ubuntu is "like Windows but not" which is mostly relevant to people boycotting Windows. Steam Deck is "a gamebox" which people who already like games might want to buy. Bazzite is "a thing that turns your computer into a gamebox." Of course, people don't actually want gameboxes either - they want to play games - but it's a few steps closer.
- pjmlp 1mo agoNo, but that is what they will ever get from OEMs selling PCs at computer stores used by normies. Also lets not forget those distros play Windows games, because hardly any studio bothers with native Linux games.
- veqq 1mo agoLinux hit 10% desktop usage recently
- pjmlp 1mo agoNot really, that was a fluke, still below 10%, although getting closer with 7.53%. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
- vkazanov 1mo agoBoth numbers are big, no? Especially given the complete dominance of linux in many other settings.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- adrian_b 1mo agoWhile I upvoted this, as being true for the general population, for me Linux has made it on the desktop (and laptop) much more than 2 decades ago, around 2003, when the remaining problems that had forced me to use dual-booting with Windows had been solved (i.e. when it became possible in Linux to play movies, read DVDs and use TV tuners). When that happened, I wiped out Windows from my computers. If you have a pro to help you, already for a long time Linux has been fine on the desktop for anyone. My parents, over 80 years old, have used Linux on their PCs for many years, and they did not even know what "Linux" is. That was possible because I installed and configured for them the operating system and all the applications they needed for reading and writing documents, Internet browsing, e-mail, music listening and movie watching etc. Windows is easy only because it comes preinstalled. I have installed Windows at work on many kinds of computers and during installation I have encountered much more problems impossible to solve for a non-expert than when installing Linux.
- ColdStream 1mo agoPretty much. I have been using Linux since 1998 but it became my only system back in about 2009 I think. It just isn't that geeky blued together unix-y thing any more. So long as your hardware is supported, thats it. Yes, the games support was rough but that is almost a non issue nowadays. Thanks to Proton and Steamdeck support, I don't even check compatibility any more on games.
- helterskelter 1mo agoI've managed to run Linux just about exclusively since probably just before I was a teen in the early 2000's. I think I bought Red Hat 8 or 9 or something like that at CompUSA on a whim and proceeded to call customer support to get help doing basic tasks on the desktop which they very kindly helped me with. Man I was feeling like a seriously 1337 h4x0r.
- acomjean 1mo agoI didn’t have a pro to help me. But I used Linux a lot on the cloud/cluster. I didn’t want to futz. So I bought a computer with Linux preinstalled. Then I got one for work. Then a desktop from a different vendor. There is an extra cost associated with it (I’m paying more for the same hardware), but for me totally worth it to have a functioning Linux install on delivery.
- sampo 1mo agoEric S. Raymond opines that now that Microsoft makes its profits mainly from Azure, some product owner in Microsoft will be allowed to enshittify Windows for collection short-term profit, thus paving way for Linux on the desktop. https://x.com/esrtweet/status/2084605702203424896 https://x.com/esrtweet/status/2084605702203424896
- IsTom 1mo agoHasn't this been happening for a while now?
- ColdStream 1mo agoAh so X/Twitter is where ESR is nowadays. Kind of not surprised.
- mike_ivanov 1mo agoAs a sign in the window of a tiny shop in my quiet suburb says "Laptop and phone repairs - Windows, Linux and MacOS". If that doesn't count, I don't know what else could.
- shevy-java 1mo agoFirst there will be the Desktop Linux of the year breakthrough. Evil folks say it will coincide with the end of the world via a total global catastrophy but these people don't understand beauty - such as TempleOS, the most perfect OS of all times.
- EarlKing 1mo agoFun fact: Duke Nukem Forever shipped before GNU Hurd.
- markus_zhang 1mo agoMaybe they are still in the same level of forever. Oh well.
- EarlKing 1mo ago"I come here to code GNU Hurd and chew bubblegum, and I got a whole lotta bubblegum..."
- ColdStream 1mo agoCome GIT some! Sorry, only pun I could think of.
- this_user 1mo agoInstead of rewriting Bun, maybe Anthropic should have thrown some tokens at finishing Hurd.
- officeplant 1mo agoWe'd have to name it Turd then.
- elevation 1mo agoThat'd be GNU/Turd to you!
- darksaints 1mo agoI hold out hope for (human) work to coalesce on creating a stable/secure microkernel (SeL4 anybody???) and getting it mature enough to build an OS on. Once that is done, then you build out the absolutely massive collection of userspace drivers that would be needed to replace linux by leveraging LLMs and other automated techniques. The good part is that by keeping the drivers in userspace, the security risk of generative techniques for driver development is pretty low.
- lanstin 1mo agoI thought work was finished to allow Hurd to use Linux device driver code as is?
- steve_taylor 1mo agoYou can't polish a Hurd.
- achyudh 1mo agoRelevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1508/ https://xkcd.com/1508/
- xg15 1mo agoI mean, we're already ahead of schedule for Elon Musk stuff and BloodDrone, so who knows...
- thomasahle 1mo agoNah, Claude will finish it over night
- pessimizer 1mo agoThat's what they tell us, but for some reason software still looks just as bad or worse than it ever has.
- voxelghost 1mo agoNext year will be the year of Hurd on the desktop, I am sure of it.
- jnpnj 1mo agoIt seems Samuel Thibault is still there, sweet. ps: some slides from earlier this year https://fosdem.org/2026/events/attachments/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnuhurd_progress_rump_drivers_64bit_smp_software_bootstrapping/slides/267668/2026-02-0_u3q2sgt.pdf https://fosdem.org/2026/events/attachments/7FZXHF-updates_on... full vid here https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnuhurd_progress_rump_drivers_64bit_smp_software_bootstrapping/ https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/7FZXHF-updates_on_gnu...
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- isityettime 1mo ago> I plan to build bootable images and boot the kernel on Apple M1 GuixSD with GNU Hurd would be a really fun way to repurpose an old MBP.
- AloysB 1mo agoMy M1 is currently running Guix on Fedora, I would love to see this!
- shevy-java 1mo agoNext year will be the year of GNU Hurd, as well as The Desktop Linux Year and people really using HaikuOS on real hardware for years. You read it here first!
- 800xl 1mo agoHa I just booted Haiku on my desktop yesterday and it ran surprisingly well. Kind of took me back to 2001. If Firefox is stable on it I actually probably could switch from Windows (my needs are pretty simple at home).
- csb6 1mo agoDoes anyone more familiar with Hurd know how they addressed performance issues encountered by other Mach-based kernels? I remember reading that one of Mach's bottlenecks was validating that each IPC message had proper permissions/access when sending them between processes due to the large number and frequency of messages.
- floxy 1mo agoIs that a bottleneck anymore? Maybe something that was appreciable in 1994 isn't a big performance hit in 2026?
- Analemma_ 1mo agoIsn't it even worse now? The faster computers get, the more that software-induced bottlenecks hurt.
- Manozco 1mo agoI'm not a Hurd contributor ( or any OS kernel / library ). I'm not sure this holds today. One example I can see is related to crypto. We used to have specific hardware for computing cryptography functions but it's now handled directly in standard hardware and the software has not evolved ( but it's been faster and faster to compute checksum functions )
- monocasa 1mo agoI mean, every major arch has crypto specific acceleration instructions.
- doubled112 1mo agoI could see just powering through because modern hardware is fast enough to do so being an option. Adding 20% to a 10 second operation is a lot longer on a wall clock than adding 20% to a 1 second operation.
- 1mo ago
- inigyou 1mo agoCool to finally see some small silly tech stuff here that isn't trying to make money.
- bofadeez 1mo ago[flagged]
- oytis 1mo agoYou are calling a Linux (sorry, GNU/Linux) killer small silly stuff?
- maplant 1mo agoI'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as GNU/Linux, is in fact, just Linux.
- inigyou 1mo agoYeah GNU hasn't really been involved for a long time. It's Mozilla/Linux in reality. Not to mention the totally GNU-free distributions, like Alpine.
- ColdStream 1mo agoThe efforts people will go to in order to avoid GPL3. Makes you wonder why?
- inigyou 1mo agoBecause large corporations want to take without giving.
- ColdStream 1mo agoYep, look at Apples 12 year journey of rebuilding everything that was moved up to GPL3.
- MisterTea 1mo ago> 9pfs for the Hurd From the wiki: > 9P is perhaps not as robust or as fault tolerant as NFS How is it not robust? What metric did they use? Fault tolerance is not explained here so I don't know what they mean by this. You can use aan(8) on 9front which runs on each side of the connection and holds it open if the network breaks, then resume on reconnect.
- pshirshov 1mo agoTales from the crypt.
- api 1mo agoSomeone should do the blasphemous thing and have Opus 5 finish HURD. Actually in all seriousness reviving dead interesting FOSS projects is one use for AI coding I've thought about.
- 0xpgm 1mo agoAre AIs good enough at doing novel work that they have yet to encounter? My guess is that the GNU/HURD people are doing a lot of novel work that doesn't yet exist.
- farfatched 1mo agoHow novel is it really? You think what they're doing isn't covered in the intersection of OS books, OS papers, other OSs, osdev, random GitHub projects?
- 0xpgm 1mo agoAI to some extent learns APIs. If they are doing new things they are probably introducing new kinds of interfaces.
- cmrdporcupine 1mo agoMy opinion is Sol or Fable could absolutely "finish" Hurd (whatever the definition of "finished" is), but it would be difficult to review and understand everything it did, nobody would trust it, people would raise copyright concerns, doing so would violate all sorts of GNU cultural norms, and it would sit in a repo unused.
- api 1mo agoThus my "blasphemous" comment.
- shaggie76 1mo agoI can't help but feel disappointed that after 35 years the first thing they're talking about is an SVG logo. I mean, there's a certain novelty that it was made on a laptop running Hurd itself, but still I was left with a sense that progress is meandering and whimsical. I remember being excited by Hurd's ambitions after studying Tanenbaum's OS book in university and drinking the microkernel kool-aid; now I'm too old and jaded to believe it'll be a viable alternative.
- browningstreet 1mo agoIt’s like farmer’s market craft fair tech. Same vibes. Last neckbeards standing?
- ColdStream 1mo agoThere was a brief period about 10 years back where there was a sudden burst of activity on Hurd, but that started to dwindle shortly afterwards. Alas, it is like Fusion power, always moving forwards but under funded to get it across the line into something more. For every year development Hurd moves forward, so does everyone else's, only the they have much more resources.
- fithisux 1mo agoThe D compiler port to Hurd is very interesting
- farfatched 1mo agoI would love GNU Hurd to succeed. That said, if there's a resurgence in microkernel, it will probably come from the Rust community.
- JAlexoid 1mo agoI agree. Operating systems have become too fast.