Let's be fair to both sides here. The new way of working that Linus brought about absolutely crushed Hurd's "We have our team of experts and we don't want any

Let's be fair to both sides here. The new way of working that Linus brought about absolutely crushed Hurd's "We have our team of experts and we don't want any help". It wasn't so much that the Hurd was destined to fail to deliver, it's more that the success of Linux made it completely irrelevant at a pace that nobody would have expected (not even Linus). I mean they even beat the law suits to free up BSD. This is one of the few things my feeble ageing memory recalls fairly clearly :-) I desperately wanted to work on the Hurd, but they rejected me because I was a noob. Then I was desperately waiting for BSD to pass through the legal gauntlet. Then a colleague said, "What about Linux? They just got X working. It seems pretty good". It really came out of nowhere -- not necessarily due to good development (thought there was lots of that), but rather because key early contributors were encouraged and enabled to participate by Linus. We were all desperately waiting and many talented people just leaped at the opportunity to do something (not me, unfortunately -- I got sidetracked with work :-P). In comparison to the rest of GNU, it was just a piece. A pretty big piece, but just a piece none-the-less. Keep in mind the amount of work that went into GCC and glibc, which at the time were comparable projects. Without those pieces, Linus would have nowhere to start. Then all the user land tools -- again, without those I don't think anybody would have joined in. They would have waited for BSD. And those user land tools were really good. The first thing I did when I installed a new Unix box was install GNU. GNU was important in Unix land before anyone had ever heard of Linux. Sometimes I think younger people have no real concept about how much code was part of GNU. The goal of GNU was to give you a fully functioning POSIX system. One of the reasons we even have POSIX is because of the work of the guys working on GNU. When we say that it's Linux with GNU, that's really to distinguish it from, say, Linux with Android. Or Linux with BSD (if anyone does that). I'm not actually sure how much GNU is regularly used in a Linux distro these days, but I still prefer it to alternatives (maybe I'm just old). Again, we're really talking about having a full POSIX compliant system and the kernel is just a part of that. Linux is super fantastic and I actually choose Linux over other possible kernels because of how good it is. But I'm never going to run Android on my desktop, no matter that it runs a Linux kernel. I'd rather not run Android on my phone, if I had any choice in the matter! To be even more fair, I always thought we should have given X a bit more air time. Especially these days, it's important to me if I've got X or Wayland running. But it was always a bit daft to think that people were going to be saying GNU/Linux. It's even more daft to think that people would say GNU/X/Linux or GNU/Wayland/Linux. It really doeasn't roll off the tongue ;-)