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Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I tried Debian/Herd on a spare box. I think that lasted for what, a week? It was a less than complete experience, so I moved on to more fruitful experiments.
...i'm absolutely ignorant of its current state, but every time i've checked in on progress of GNU/hurd over the past three decades, it still hasn't matured into a stable production-ready platform: i'm not sure if that's an artifact of technical viability or developer interest...
Both, I think.
It's built in top of Mach, which has some architectural issues that aren't fixable without a huge amount of work.
And no one's interested in doing that work because we already have Linux and Linux is fine.
There have been a couple of pretty good post mortems over the years. I think one of them is on gnu.org somewhere.
...NeXTstep was built on mach and, although i'm unsure if any antecedents remain in macOS, it was certainly production-ready in its day; i remember a couple of decades ago there were stopgap versions of the HURD built on top of mach instead of their own microkernel but i thought that was only ever intended as a temporary workaround...
...i presume on that basis that sustained developer interest was its greatest hurdle, no pun intended...
edit: ...is this the post-mortem you mentioned?..
I haven't seen that paper before. The ones I remember were blogposts or web pages. In fact, this may be what I was remembering: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.html Particularly the part about what happened with the port to different microkernels.
IIRC NeXT and OSX use Mach, but they don't use it as intended. I think they're mostly a BSD kernel with Mach functioning as an interface to userspace.
Hurd actually used Mach as a microkernel, and moved most functionality to userspace daemons. This meant that Mach's performance issues,, at least the ones related to IPC, affected the Hurd a lot more than OSX or NeXT.
And yeah, I think developer interest was the biggest thing that held it back.
I wasn't able to get a good read on it either. I didn't spot anything obviously wrong from a technical standpoint, but I'm not a systems developer. It just doesn't have much that distinguishes it on a non-technical level. The design is neat, but other OS projects like Redox have shot past it in a shorter period of time. That tells me something's broken, whether it's technical or social.