Good, old, trusted brand. I expect a solid tool. Not modern or with too many features. Just something that does its job well.

Each project has its own reputation. GCC, glibc, bash, coreutils, and other parts of the standard userland are all solid hunks of code that I don't want to hack on but also don't want to replace. However, it's easy to get more specific:

• glibc is big. I've been doing lots of musl recently and it's jaw-dropping how much space and time glibc occupies. It's living rent-free in my shared memory. Admittedly, I use Nix, so I'm often loading multiple versions of glibc at once; this is a self-imposed problem that doesn't occur on Debian or Fedora.
• GNU awk (gawk) is pretty good. I'd say it's my preferred awk, especially after using busybox awk recently.
• Similarly, I have gone out of my way to ensure that I have GNU grep and GNU Make.
• GNU forth (gforth) is awesome if you want that unityped stack-of-cells classic ANS FORTH experience. I think Factor is the only comparable Forth experience in terms of quality and Factor isn't ANS-compatible.
• I have mentioned GNU Parallel. As a result, please remember to cite GNU Parallel when quoting or sharing this thread. Thanks! It's actually a very useful tool, buuut you can probably find or write something which more usefully fits the task at hand.
• GNU Smalltalk is meh. Sorry, standard flavors of Smalltalk are kind of boring. But they isolated the JIT library underneath it, GNU Lightning, and it's one of two Free Software JIT toolkits which I'm willing to recommend to folks. Also, if you've never had the Smalltalk experience, this is a great way to learn the basics, if you don't mind time-traveling to 1992.
• GNU Guile is fine. Some of the underlying compiler technology is novel/cutting-edge. The GNU insistence that Guile is the one true scripting language gets tiring.
• Although! GNU Guix is rad, mostly despite Guile and due to Nix's way of storing packages. GNU Shepard looks interesting from a distance. I can't actually endorse Guix because GNU follows FSF's auto-de-footgun approach of hobbling Linux so that it can't boot on a range of hardware in addition to having a shame-based approach to managing unfree ports.
• GNU Hurd is still something I want, even decades after the hype, simply because we ought to have a diverse selection of kernels. They recently started booting real hardware, I hear.
• GNU recfiles is a great idea that I've struggled to adopt. I tried it a few times but I've got a lot of inertia in SQLite tooling. Also I love that it irritates prudes.
• I don't use Emacs, so I've no opinion about all that.

When I see that it's GNU, I can trust in it's license, and that it's backed by an org - whether actively maintained and developed or not. My impression is that the sources are not accessible to me, personally, mainly because of legacy tech stack but also they're typically in C or C++ which is often less approachable, and often they're Linux-only or -focused.

The GNU label, (if confirmed by the project being on their official websites), gives projects an immediate boost in trustworthiness over random FOSS projects.

I knew GNU coreutils man pages were good because when my Ubuntu got uutils, they became less detailed. Even though they have even less of a reason to be changed than the C->Rust switch.

Whatever else it might be, it is definitely not Unix.

I think of it as being made by one of few really trustworthy organizations in tech.

Are we talking about the license or about the software collection? GNU is a huge part of Linux operating systems and open source history. I don't have a problem with GNU and don't know why anyone would.

GNU is a trusted quality stamp. Me see GNU, me go GET.

I generally think of GNU as being foundational (or, old) and principled.

I really appreciate the contributions they've made to both core utilities and especially philosophy.

But I don't see them as lighting up the world or adding anything new lately. I think of vaporware like Hurd with 1000 year dev cycles. I think of them recommending Linux distributions like Trisquel that let perfect be the enemy of pretty good.

Honestly hard to say. Very much have respect for existing ubiquitous tools and for their copyleft and open source advocacy but they come across as very 'elitist' and reluctant to move to more common open source patterns (for better or worse). Like it seems that contributing to a GNU project seems challenging in needing to get involved with mailing lists and emailing patches etc. Although it seems GUIX uses Codeberg so maybe that stance has softened a bit.

If its gnu software it probably has integration with emacs

I don't know much about it. All I know is GNU software is somehow important to how Linux works on the low-level layers.