GNU Guix will end support for the Linux kernel

The GNU Guix project official recently announced that it will gradually end support for the Linux kernel and replace it with the Hurd kernel.

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the Hurd or the Linux kernel, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64 machines.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a standalone GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to operating system configuration management. Guix is highly customizable and hackable through Guile programming interfaces and extensions to the Scheme language.

Last May, after years of development, GNU Guix finally released version 1.0.0. The official announcement stated that over the years, the project has been working hard to obtain support for running locally on the GNU/Hurd operating system. This also means that users can quickly replace the original Linux-Libre kernel with the Hurd kernel. The upcoming version of Guix 1.1 will be the last version with the Linux-Libre kernel. “Future versions of Guix System will run exclusively on the Hurd, and we expect to remove Linux-Libre entirely by Guix 2.0.”