August 5, 2026
Hurd of it? The comments did
GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
GNU Hurd keeps inching forward as fans cheer, joke, and roast its endless comeback
TLDR: GNU Hurd posted another real progress report, including better hardware support and a more modern way to handle storage devices. The community reaction was half cheerleading, half roast session, with fans hopeful but others joking that Hurd’s big moment is always just one more year away.
The biggest plot twist in GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2 isn’t just that this famously slow-moving operating system project is still alive — it’s that the community can’t decide whether to celebrate, laugh, or both. On paper, the update is packed: new file-sharing work, better standards compliance, bug fixes, write support, early Rust support, and even progress toward running on newer Arm-based machines like the Apple M1. There’s also a quietly huge quality-of-life change brewing: instead of manually listing storage devices ahead of time, Hurd may finally learn to discover them at startup like a modern system. For Hurd watchers, that’s real movement.
But the comments? Pure tragicomedy. One person dropped a stunned “Wow.” Another delivered the classic Hurd mood in one line: maybe it’ll have its day in 100 years. That’s the central drama here: is this a heartwarming underdog story, or the longest tech tease in history? The faithful are still hanging on — one commenter seemed genuinely reassured that veteran developer Samuel Thibault is “still there,” like spotting a beloved character surviving another season finale. Meanwhile, dreamers are already imagining GNU Hurd on an old MacBook Pro, which gives this whole saga a weirdly wholesome fan-fiction energy.
And then came the meme-tier prophecy: “Next year will be the year of GNU Hurd” — paired with the equally eternal jokes about “the year of Linux on the desktop” and Haiku taking over real hardware. In other words, the community reaction is a cocktail of hope, sarcasm, nostalgia, and gallows humor. Hurd may still be crawling, but the comment section is sprinting.
Key Points
- •Sergey Bugaev published a work-in-progress 9pfs translator for GNU Hurd, with basic browsing, file reading, internal 9P RPC tracking, and later some write support.
- •Diego Nieto Cid’s patches to let privileged users set task priority landed in glibc and GNU Mach, alongside several bug fixes including an adjtime fix useful for OpenNTPD.
- •Paulo Duarte submitted an RFC patch series to integrate earlier AArch64 ABI work into GNU Mach, reporting 12/12 tests passing on x86_64, i686, and aarch64 under QEMU.
- •Almudena Garcia is developing a Rust-based trivfs implementation, enabling Hurd translators to be written in Rust, though the work is not yet complete.
- •Mikhail Karpov’s work on storeio and partfs aims to replace static /dev entries with dynamic SATA device population at boot time.