I hope Hurd has its day. Maybe in 100 years or something.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1508/
GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
31–40 of 163 posts
Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
It 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.
Ah, 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.
Oh 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.
Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux hit 10% desktop usage recently
Not really, that was a fluke, still below 10%, although getting closer with 7.53%. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Both numbers are big, no? Especially given the complete dominance of linux in many other settings.
Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
#34Does 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.
Is that a bottleneck anymore? Maybe something that was appreciable in 1994 isn't a big performance hit in 2026?
Isn't it even worse now? The faster computers get, the more that software-induced bottlenecks hurt.
Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
#35Does 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.
Is there reason to think they've addressed them?
Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that a bottleneck anymore? Maybe something that was appreciable in 1994 isn't a big performance hit in 2026?
Isn't it even worse now? The faster computers get, the more that software-induced bottlenecks hurt.
I'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 )
Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
#37I hope Hurd has its day. Maybe in 100 years or something.
Hurd will have its day once Linux makes it on the desktop :-)
Eric 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.
Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It 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.
Ah, 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.
People using Linux in 1992 would say something similar to people using any of the current flavours of Linux.
Re: GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
#39Cool to finally see some small silly tech stuff here that isn't trying to make money.
You are calling a Linux (sorry, GNU/Linux) killer small silly stuff?