The GNU project was started in 1983 and in 2025 you can finally use a pure GNU operating system. Not that you’d want to but that is some serious perseverance.
Since the title is a little unclear: this is not the first release of Debian/Hurd, which was first released in 2013, just a new one for 2025.
Now? Hurd was there since forever. Plus there was (or is, not interested, so never actually checked) a variant with the BSD kernel.
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was definitively a thing.
From the article:
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD used the Debian userland on top of the FreeBSD kernel, although sadly, due to lack of manpower the project ended in 2023. There was a similar effort using the kernel from the slightly older BSD, Debian GNU/NetBSD. Multiple others have been suggested, including ports to the kernels of OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, IBM’s OS/2 kernel and others.
Even the article description is misleading, none of this is new, the only new bit is 64 bits which is cool I guess?
What are the pros and cons of running Debian without Linux?
Pros: you try something new and fun, and get an unusual setup running
Cons: literally everything else
@cornshark @cm0002 The main con is that it won’t run.
