Fifteen months have passed since our last Guix/Hurd on a Thinkpad X60 post and a lot has happened with respect to the Hurd.
And most of you will have guessed, unless you skipped the title of this post, the rumored x86_64 support has landed in Guix!
↫ Janneke Nieuwenhuizen and Yelninei at the Guix blog
A huge amount of work has gone into this effort over the past 18 months, but you can now download Guix and alongside the Linux kernel, you can now opt for the Hurd as well, in eother 32bit or 64 bit flavour. Do note that while Debian GNU/Hurd offers about 75% of Debian packages, Guix/Hurd only offers about 1.7% (32-bit) and 0.9% (64-bit) of packages for now. These percentages are always growing, of course, and now that Guix/Hurd can be installed in virtual machines and even on bare metal relatively easily like this, things might speed up a bit.
This is GREAT news for all fans of Guix/Hurd that they realized that they NEED a 64-bit version of their OS or it would die out when computers could no longer run 32 operating systems.
Unfortunately for fans of OS/2, Arca Noae ( https://www.arcanoae.com/ ) who is licensed by IBM to keep drivers updated for new hardware (not ALL new hardware but “enough”) are NOT interested in creating a 64-bit version of OS/2 which I think is absolutely STUPID because it means there WILL come a time when companies (and personal users) will NOT be able to install OS/2 on new hardware. I am doing my best to spell out this future to the Arca Noae team but they just can’t see that there is a cliff that they are driving towards like Thelma and Louise (look up the movie). This leaves me TOTALLY frustrated. They COULD make a version of OS/2 which runs everything they run now PLUS 64-bit OS/2 native programs. This would allow a MUCH easier path to update programs to 64-bit OS/2 programs instead of migrating them to Windows (the idea makes me throw up) or Linux but OS/2 is FAR more stable than both. There are servers that run OS/2 programs that haven’t been rebooted in TWO DECADES and are still running. The only fear is turning off the hardware and it not booting back up. But thankfully Arca Noae’s updates will allow them to install on new hardware … for now.
Thankfully another team which is maintaining the open source version of BeOS called Haiku ALSO realize that they need a 64-bit version of Haiku which they have had for awhile now and it is the 32-bit that will eventually be culled from the OS.