Hurd
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In the GNU Guix forum Janneke posted an info about Hurd and its availability in Guix.
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2026/the-64-bit-hurd
According to her statements Debian managed 75 % of its packages to make available in Hurd.
How about Trisquel?
When will it be possible to use Hurd for Trisquel?
Are there already plans or starting work about it?
Gottfried
I am a translator!
Hi Gottfried,
Trisquel is based on Ubuntu and not on Debian, and I could not find any support for the Hurd in Ubuntu. If so, supporting the Hurd in Trisquel would require looking at Debian (and from https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-news, it seems that Debian GNU/Hurd has its own specific release that is also different from Debian). This makes me think that the amount of work could be tremendous, while most people interested in the Hurd might not be interested in Trisquel.
I've run Debian Hurd before experimentally, and I noticed that every package that does run on Debian Hurd is fully free software already. So I don't think there would be any real advantage to making a Trisquel Hurd version, either for the users or for the Trisquel developers. Maybe if you could get Abrowser working with Hurd, but I couldn't get any graphical browsers at all to run with Hurd on Debian and I doubt it would be much easier on a Trisquel base.
I know that Trisquel is based on Ubuntu and not on Debian,
but Ubuntu is based on Debian
and that`s why may be Hurd friendly and offering Hurd in future.
It could be even interesting for people in future
if somebody is looking for distros which offer Hurd
to find Trisquel also in the boat.
Hurd will have future,
of course it still takes time
but Guix is already offering Hurd to install, now only for experimenting,
because X11 is not yet available with Hurd in Guix,
and no desktop apps.
but in future if work would be managable and easier to get Hurd for Trisquel developers
it would be a very interesting option to have Hurd in the boat.
I see this as a very impressive and exciting option for all GNU distros.
>"I know that Trisquel is based on Ubuntu and not on Debian,
but Ubuntu is based on Debian
and that`s why may be Hurd friendly and offering Hurd in future."
I don't know if that's possible. Ubuntu has extremely rigid dependencies on systemd - I don't know of any possible way to change either Ubuntu or Trisquel to a different init system. In fact, I'm pretty sure that in 2026 it is basically impossible to replace systemd in Ubuntu or Trisquel.
GNU/Hurd on the other hand requires GNU/Shepherd as its init system, and GNU/Shepherd is the init system used by Debian Hurd and by Guix Hurd. Debian is able to use GNU/Shepherd because it is possible to change away from Debian's default systemd init system. And Guix can use GNU/Shepherd because that is the init system that regular Guix uses anyway.
So to summarize:
Ubuntu - must only use systemd init system
GNU/Hurd - must only use GNU/Shepherd init system
Debian - is able to use ANY init system, including the default systemd or GNU/Shepherd init system
Guix - uses the same GNU/Shepherd init system that GNU/Hurd uses
That's just one point where a GNU/Hurd Trisquel would probably not be possible, unless Trisquel changed to a Debian base (which I am personally in favor of).
There are probably other issues with Ubuntu that would also make it nearly impossible to make that change to the GNU/Hurd kernel. Ubuntu is an enormous chaotic mess of packages pulled from Debian stable, Debian testing, Debian unstable, Debian experimental, Debian contrib, from snaps, from other third party repositories including non-free repos, etc etc etc. It's amazing that Trisquel can be built at all out of that monstrous mess of non-conforming packages and libraries, and it doesn't appear to benefit Trisquel users much, as the main benefit of Ubuntu is using newer packages, which Trisquel almost never has because Trisquel gets based on 2-year-old versions of Ubuntu with old packages.
> GNU/Hurd - must only use GNU/Shepherd init system
Pretty sure this is not true as I have an AMD64 image from August 2025, that uses sysvinit.
I think it's a good idea to support GNU/Hurd on Debian or Guix. I just do not know how to do that on Guix.
Looks like you are right, as I see that sysvinit maintainer Jesse Smith released at least one update involving GNU/Hurd in 2022: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/sysvinit-devel/2022-04/msg00001.html
However, you aren't going to get systemd running with GNU/Hurd, and you aren't going to get GNU/Shepherd or sysvinit running with Trisquel. So the point still stands.
thanks Andyprough for the explanation.
Already 10 years ago my fellow worker was shaking his head when I wanted to install Ubuntu, because he was a Debian user for long time and said: In Debian everything is in one place not like in Ubuntu. Why not installing Debian? And the politics of Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu leader, is very problematic.
I don´t know why Trisquel developers chose Ubuntu,
they surely had good reasons,
but Ubuntu developed this way
and in future, with my little understanding,
probably Debian is a better base for Trisquel.
If it is manageable to transfer
it would have many benefits for Trisquel.
Everything in one place...
Even additionally to use shepherd and Hurd
which will be the future for GNU distros.
But there is a long way to go, I guess,...