Following an April Fools' Day tease of Gentoo claiming they were going to switch to [1]GNU Hurd as their primary kernel moving forward, they have now acknowledged the joke but in fact also announcing there are now experimental Gentoo GNU/Hurd images available.

Gentoo GNU/Hurd images are now available for those wanting to test a Gentoo + Hurd combination within a virtual machine. But don't expect to get too far if wanting to run on real modern hardware given the constraints of Hurd. Gentoo GNU/Hurd is akin to [2]the Debian GNU/Hurd effort .

Gentoo GNU/Hurd remains "heavily experimental" and for now is i686 builds while x86_64 feature parity is a future goal. Release media like stages and automated image builds are part of future plans.

Their revised announcement does show Gentoo GNU/Hurd running on "real hardware" too, but given the size of the display bezel on that Dell laptop, it's a very ancient machine.

Those interested can find the Gentoo GNU/Hurd announcement at [3]Gentoo.org .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/GNU+Hurd

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-GNU-Hurd-2025

[3] https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/04/01/gentoo-hurd.html