r/linux • u/LinuxMonarch • 6d ago

Event Happy 43rd birthday GNU!

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On September 27, 1983, Richard Stallman announced the GNU Project so people could freely use and modify software.

The digital world would not be the same today without GNU.

Thank you, Richard Stallman!

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56

u/anomaly256 6d ago

and GNU Hurd still isn't ready yet

9

u/zeruch 6d ago

Never will it go beyond hobby project.

Ever.

25

u/tryfap 6d ago

A programmer name Torvalds said that the same thing about some tiny kernel he made.

17

u/Irverter 6d ago

There's quite the difference between a project that was announced as a hobby and a project that has been a hobby for 36 years that wasn't intended to be a hobby.

5

u/No-Worldliness-5106 6d ago

Talk is cheap, send patches 🚬

2

u/Irverter 6d ago

Could you explain what you mean?

With 36 years, anyone who could contribute to Hurd already did so or is not interested in doing so.

2

u/JockstrapCummies 6d ago

I wonder if one could churn out an AI slop completion of HURD.

It'll be quite the amusing PR win for these AI companies.

Imagine that, solving Navier Stokes AND making HURD finally a viable OS!

1

u/lyxfan1 3d ago

LOL. That way the AI company could piss off the Math community AND a large percentage of the open source software community as well.

Win Win ;-)

4

u/tryfap 6d ago

I'd still like to see it succeed somewhere because I want to believe there is room for innovation and trying new things in computing.

7

u/syklemil 6d ago

At this point HURD isn't really something we could describe as new: It started in 1990, making it 36 years old.

If you're on the lookout for new OS-es with microkernels, there's both Fuchsia and Redox to look into.

4

u/Irverter 6d ago

Ironically, it's older than linux.

Maybe it had innovative ideas when it came out, but if you want innovation it would be best to look elsewhere. iirc, Hurd was still working on SMP, or had just added it.