no it's not, the GNU system was already established by then,.and in use with other kernels. Linus was referring to GNU as a whole, not Hurd.

GNU was a toolchain in search of a kernel; which was supposed to be Hurd.

(It often got installed on top of “real” Unix because it was a damn good toolchain)

Still is.

The standard tools were always sort of unergonomic on all of AIX, Sun/Solaris, DEC/Alpha, SCO, and *BSD.

I don't know but it seems people (or at least old geezers) install GNU on top of Macs these days.

They famously did better than the proprietary shell tools in the original fuzzpocalypse https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~robby/courses/395-495-200... . I also think I recall reading, somewhere on jwz dot org, something which purported to be an internal SGI email giving a dismal account of the quality of the Irix tools. GNU tools often have expanded feature sets, too. But I think that GNU-tools adopters were probably also driven by a standardisation impulse to at least have the same bugs and quirks as everyone else.

Yes, here it is: “Software Usability II” by Tom Davis, the “Irix bloat memo” https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/sgi-irix-bloat-document.t... . Mind you, that bloat would probably look very modest nowadays.

I mean a lot of the stuff he's complaining about being crap aren’t exactly replaceable by the GNU coreutils.

People installed them on AIX/Solaris etc because the BSD/SysV tools they came with were basically abandoned. The GNU tools had a lot more useful features, not specifically more performant (although they probably were)

Sometimes they were faster but there certainly were more “bloated” - you can find people complaining about it from the era.

But they really did have tons of options and once you were used to them, you really wanted them.

But remember that GNU grew up in the era of multi-user systems; and Linux was the forefront of “personal computing Unix” where the user had root.

> I don't know but it seems people (or at least old geezers) install GNU on top of Macs these days.

Me, I do this! I like being able to tack flags on after positional args if I remember them after typing a command. I like some of the convenience flags added to the GNU versions coreutils, grep, and findutils. Even `parallel` implementation I've used before is GNU parallel. I've never really learned mawk, to the extent I know awk at all, it's gawk.

(I don't like the common convention of prefixing them with `g` on macOS, either. I install them with Nix and just preempt the system ones on my PATH.)

Missing the little detail that since Sun started charging for developer tools, all other UNIX vendors followed suit, thus GCC finally started to get mindshare.

GNU HURD is not like GNU/Linux. The latter stands for a combination of Linux kernel with GNU userland. They're distinct projects. GNU HURD on the other hand, is just a subproject of GNU. The entire OS is called just GNU, like how the BSDs are today. So if Torvalds meant the HURD, he would explicitly mentioned it.

I think you are wrong.

It was too new. Linus' mail was in August; GNU only announced its new OS in May:

https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history/hurd-announce

I think the GNU OS didn't even have a name yet.

The second announcement was in 1993 and by then it had a name:

https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history/hurd-announce2

So, no, I think that, as generally accepted, he meant the entire GNU OS.

> So, no, I think that, as generally accepted, he meant the entire GNU OS.

That's what I meant too - Torvalds was talking about the OS, not just the kernel. I don't understand the difference or the mistake that you're trying to highlight.