this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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I generally think of GNU as being foundational (or, old) and principled.
I really appreciate the contributions they've made to both core utilities and especially philosophy.
But I don't see them as lighting up the world or adding anything new lately. I think of vaporware like Hurd with 1000 year dev cycles. I think of them recommending Linux distributions like Trisquel that let perfect be the enemy of pretty good.
i've used trisquel on my primary machine at some point in the past, it was hassle free and pretty much just ubuntu
Oh, that's good to hear! Always had the impression that the blob-free distros caused compatibility headaches, but glad to be wrong I suppose.
Edit: And I should say I didn't mean to pick on Trisquel in particular, it was just the one GNU recommended distro I remembered by name.
To be fair, Hurd recently made a decent splash. And strictly speaking, it's troubles weren't specifically GNU. Without all the legal quagmire around BSD we would all be on it. Linux would just be some niche hobby project just like Hurd. It was unfortunately a victim of timing. Both in that sense and the direction computing took in the future. Heavy IPC across multiple discrete CPU cores is a bad idea for performance. It works but it's slooooow
It did? When? Where?