Comment by ofalkaed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ofalkaed | Hacker News Reader

I have not followed Hurd since ~2010 when development stalled, what is the purpose of Hurd at this point? Is it just hobbyists having fun and exploring the possibilities or are they still trying to become a viable option or something else or a little of a bunch of things? I think I will try installing Debian GNU/Hurd on an old laptop, always wanted to play with Hurd but I never succeeded in getting any computer I had to boot up with it and never had interest in running OSes in VMs.

Years ago I was met with derisive laughter from everyone when I said Haiku would hit 1.0 before Hurd. I also said that Haiku would beat linux to the opensource desktop widely used by the average person who is not concerned with opensource, but I think that was mostly stirring the pot because of the reaction to my previous statement. All these years later and Haiku hitting 1.0 seems inevitable and even the idea of it becoming a widely adopted opensource OS does not seem that far fetched. I would like to see Hurd hit 1.0, but I am fairly skeptical at this point.

I suppose ChromeOS/linux beat Haiku to the punch for the opensource desktop, but I think I will stick to my guns on this one and play semantics, many in the linux/oss view ChromeOS as linux/oss in name only. A cheat but I think Haiku has earned it.

Edit: Forgot that Chomium was opensource but ChromeOS is not, so I guess I had no need to play semantics.

Well, prior to this release I would have said "there is no point", but it looks like Hurd has finally gotten rid of some of the major warts I remember when I first took at look at it over a decade ago.

A lot of software fails to build on Hurd because it makes (often dangerously) false assumptions that the software really needs to think about properly. `PATH_MAX` is the most visible one, but others exist as well.

(By contrast, I have found that software that fails on one of the BSDs is often failing because the particular OS completely lacks some essential feature, or at least lacks a stable API/ABI thereto.)

So what would you say its point is now?

I love how Haiku feels like it has its feet in two places at once. That it is both in the year 2000 and 2040 at the same time.

It does feel a lot more user ready than a lot of alternatives. Although I did find it funny that on their last release a big milestone is that it can now compile code a little faster than half the speed of Linux. So performance is still lacking but gaining. Considering their team size compared with Linux, that is a big achievement.

I think things like compilation speed are fairly low on their priority list because they are focusing on the user and not the developer, the people who are not going to bother compiling anything and want the OS to be something they never have to think about. Lack of focus on the user seems a big part of why I think linux has failed to gain a real foothold, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the linux community pushed too hard long before it viable for that use case and now there are alot of people out there who tried linux a decade ago and remember spending a lot of time fiddling with their system and jumping through hoops instead of just using the computer for those things they use a computer for. Some distros are viable these days for the average person, but a lot of those average people have a bad taste left in their mouth from when they tried <my favorite distro is perfect for you!>.

Absolutely, I do appreciate that the developers are so honest about the performance issues. That it is lslightly faster than half the speed is impressive when you consider the sheer scale difference contributors.

And focusing on the users is a very smart move. It is better to do average expectations somevery well than to do pure ideological design poorly. Haiku is focusing it just right I feel.

> Forgot that Chomium was opensource but ChromeOS is not, so I guess I had no need to play semantics.

I won’t argue the semantics, but I will be a pedant :-) “ChromiumOS” absolutely exists and is FOSS-licensed. It’s a mess to build — basically a bunch of ebuild overlays for Gentoo’s build system and a boatload of custom tooling/scripts which produce images for a given system configuration, if I remember correctly. I don’t know much about it honestly, but it is open source! At least in the same way Chromium is.

Note that Guix also runs on the Hurd and has first class support for running a Hurd VM service if you just want to play around.

https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2024/hurd-on-thinkpad/

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