Gentoo has a Hurd port you can boot today, plus a straight-faced promise to ditch Linux by year’s end. We’re guessing only one of those things is real.
In what we’re assuming to be partly an April Fools’ Day jest, Gentoo announced on April 1 that they’ve ported the distro to Hurd. They also said that by the end of the year they’ll be dropping the Linux kernel entirely to go all in on Hurd:
“Linux has long been a source of unreliability. Despite the experimental status of the port, we’ve found the Hurd to be immensely more robust, and hope to be able to discontinue Linux support by the end of 2026. Previous generations of developers already attempted to port Gentoo to the Hurd, but the world was not yet ready. It is now. You can try Gentoo GNU Hurd using a pre-prepared disk image.”
We figure the first part’s true, that there is an experimental Hurd port available, mainly because the brief article later links to a Codeberg page hosting ‘gentoo-hurd.’ The part about hoping to discontinue Linux support by the end of the year, however… As the old joke goes, they’re still working on Hurd.
Hurd, if you don’t know, is the operating system kernel that GNU folks have been working on since 1990, or since before Linux was a gleam in Linus’s eye. When it goes mainstream, somebody will probably insist that it be called GNU/Hurd.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Also, I’m bringing back Fuduntu today.