34
WDYT about GNU (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
30 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'm interested in finding out what people think when they see something GNU. What do you associate with it? Do you tend to be more or less interested in the project if.it is GNU or not? What is your perspective?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 24 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    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

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    Hurd recently made a decent splash

    It did? When? Where?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    There were some significant milestones reached in the last year. Trying to find the source I saw. But a quick check implies that it got x86-64-bit support as well as being able to run on bare metal now. Not just virtual machines inside of qemu. Definitely nothing Earth shattering or going to turn the current order on its head. But some solid progress regardless.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    i've used trisquel on my primary machine at some point in the past, it was hassle free and pretty much just ubuntu

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago*

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent