GNU Hurd Has Been Making Progress On Its x86_64 Support

[anarki2]

Sudden appreciation? Let's call it admiration for people who invest in themselves and share their work with with a small group of enthusiasts who enjoy doing the same thing.

Would you call a local football team persistently, utterly useless because they'll never play a commercially interesting world cup game that can entertain billions is people? I'd say it's just a bunch of people doing what they love on a smaller scale and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

No, wasting your talent is not "investing yourself" and there's nothing to admire about it. You still don't get it.

The "wrong with that" is the opportunity cost, which I've already explained, but again, you clearly didn't get at all.

The whole premise of this whole project is Stallman's hatred towards proprietary code, and even Linux itself. It's all a crazy, useless mess.

[SViN]

I wounder if it would be possible to ship Debian with the redox kernel

[flower]

It doesn't help anyone, in any shape or form.

it helps *them*

[SWY1985]

No, wasting your talent is not "investing yourself" and there's nothing to admire about it. You still don't get it.

The "wrong with that" is the opportunity cost, which I've already explained, but again, you clearly didn't get at all.

The whole premise of this whole project is Stallman's hatred towards proprietary code, and even Linux itself. It's all a crazy, useless mess.

If you quote me, do it properly: "Investing in themselves."

I think you are the one who doesn't get it. May be a life lesson you'll learn one day: Not everything needs to be a part of an "opportunity cost" economy.

Besides, reinventing the wheel is an extremely good way of building up skills. And sometimes, when someone reinvents the wheel, they happen upon a feature that no one has discovered before.

[AlanTuring69]

I'm a software engineer, burned out (health wise) from my job. I've come to realize that I've turned what I love into my work and in recent years the fun was gone. I've not been able to enjoy programming ever since.

I love seeing projects like this, without much chance of reaching a wider audience, continuing to make progress. It means that there are people who do this out of a sense of passion ... and that's the healthiest motivation to do any kind of work.

I hope I'll find back my passion eventually... and I'll think more than thrice before considering turning my hobby into my job again.

As someone who's gone through that process, it comes back after some time. You just need to be careful about not burning out. Software Engineering is too lucrative of a profession to give it up when one job sucked. There are plenty of coast jobs out there where you barely need to perform and can spend much of your energy on fun things, like contributing to open source projects (under pseudonyms if during working hours, of course...).

Hurd is a cool project, albeit one without any non-hobbyist purpose at this point. If anyone wants to develop their OS development skills working on an open source project, in C, then it is not a bad choice!

I don't quite understand all this sudden appreciation for something so persistently, utterly useless.

All these people, for all these decades could've done something that actually helps people. Instead, they've been doing this. A pipe dream, that will never be used for anything, by anyone. At best, you could call it l'art pour l'art, but I'm really having a hard time understanding how a software engineer could be motivated to look at things in such a way. What's the point of engineering if it serves absolutely no purpose at all? How is that fulfilling? I just don't get it. At all.

When all these people eventually die, will someone ever say, "Remember Hurd? It was so great!". Nope. No one will care. Isn't that like the saddest way to waste your life? Life is too short for this kind of cr@p.

I happen to not contribute to hurd because it's not my thing, but who are you to tell me what to do with my time? Go fuck yourself lol. Watching TV is a waste of time, playing games is a waste of time, literally recreation in general is a waste of time. If I'm interested in an open source project because it tickles my fancy and I feel like it, I'm going to contribute without giving a single fuck about whether anyone will remember or care.

[blackiwid]

Well it's not just for fun I would argue it's because there is some thing out of value if it's done through GNU/ Hurd or other kernels we will see. That is university many learned the completely useless language ADA...

I think compared to that this is super relevant, and I searched once or twice some attempt to have the ability to access filesystems in linux like it's possible in hurd, sadly it isn't.

It would be funny if people in 15 years all switch to GNU/Hurd, or at least as much as use BSD today, and I don't think it's impossible. Some things go slow for a long time but then reach a certain point where it accelerates a lot.

Take Gnu / GUIX many would call that also a useless crazy distro, yet it's very useful and my main Distribution. And if nothing else people can use their packet-manager in other distros.

[laffer1]

I don't quite understand all this sudden appreciation for something so persistently, utterly useless.

All these people, for all these decades could've done something that actually helps people. Instead, they've been doing this. A pipe dream, that will never be used for anything, by anyone. At best, you could call it l'art pour l'art, but I'm really having a hard time understanding how a software engineer could be motivated to look at things in such a way. What's the point of engineering if it serves absolutely no purpose at all? How is that fulfilling? I just don't get it. At all.

When all these people eventually die, will someone ever say, "Remember Hurd? It was so great!". Nope. No one will care. Isn't that like the saddest way to waste your life? Life is too short for this kind of cr@p.

I hate this type of attitude. Most open-source software is built by people because they find it useful or enjoy working on it. It's not for you. It's not like everyone will quit what they're working on and build something you want or work on your favorite project. That's not how it works. Most developers working on open source don't get paid anything. They don't owe you anything.

I've had horrible comments sent to me like this via email and social media before about my work. It's absolutely insane how entitled people feel about open-source software that they think they can dictate how others spend their free time.

I think GNU Hurd is a neat project, and I'd likely be working on it if I wasn't already working on another OS project.

[stormcrow]

I'm a software engineer, burned out (health wise) from my job. I've come to realize that I've turned what I love into my work and in recent years the fun was gone. I've not been able to enjoy programming ever since.

I love seeing projects like this, without much chance of reaching a wider audience, continuing to make progress. It means that there are people who do this out of a sense of passion ... and that's the healthiest motivation to do any kind of work.

I hope I'll find back my passion eventually... and I'll think more than thrice before considering turning my hobby into my job again.

This is an unfortunate problem that I think many of us older geeks & nerds never anticipated in our youth. My enjoyment (of computers) lead to IT work as well. But luckily I've kept my other hobbies to distract and help mitigate the actual physical damage IT work can have - namely repetitive motion disorders and other health issues. I started with amateur astronomy, as a computer/science hobby, but over the years I've added amateur radio as computer-adjacent as both a hobby and "just in case"(*), and recently recaptured my teenage interests in traditional visual art (drawing, paint, etc) - intentionally having nothing to do with computers for when I want a complete mental break along with reading fiction (as in, novels - nothing to do with real life computers either.) It's important to be able to step away and do something else that's totally unrelated with your job regularly - especially if you're frustrated, angry, etc.

* - emergency communications: Internet and cell service aren't reliable in any emergency that has damaged the power grid locally or regionally in the US.

[andyprough]

When all these people eventually die, will someone ever say, "Remember Hurd? It was so great!". Nope. No one will care. Isn't that like the saddest way to waste your life? Life is too short for this kind of cr@p.

"Huge crowds of people have to celebrate *those other people* when they die or otherwise their entire lives would have been useless".

If that's all you can come up with for trolling RMS and his friends then just give it up already. Troll well or don't bother to troll at all. It's too bad birdie died - rookies like you should be required to take introductory trolling classes from masters like him.

[npwx]

I don't quite understand all this sudden appreciation for something so persistently, utterly useless.

All these people, for all these decades could've done something that actually helps people. Instead, they've been doing this. A pipe dream, that will never be used for anything, by anyone. At best, you could call it l'art pour l'art, but I'm really having a hard time understanding how a software engineer could be motivated to look at things in such a way. What's the point of engineering if it serves absolutely no purpose at all? How is that fulfilling? I just don't get it. At all.

When all these people eventually die, will someone ever say, "Remember Hurd? It was so great!". Nope. No one will care. Isn't that like the saddest way to waste your life? Life is too short for this kind of cr@p.

Some of us just love writing software. I've written a lot of software which you probably use on a daily basis, and I've spent (multiple times) years writing software, including an entire protocol stack for some weird radio protocols you've probably never heard of, just because it was fun and interesting to me. I regret neither.