I still haven't used Hurd, and at this point with the ridiculous diversity in hardware for desktop and laptops I don't think I could realistically use it for anything outside of playing with it in a virtual machine or something.
Still, a part of me wishes we lived in the alternative universe where Hurd had taken over the world instead of Linux. I don't know much about kernel design so I'm speaking out of my ass here, but I've always thought that the microkernel design was more elegant than the monolithic thing we ended up with. I don't know that the alternate universe would be "better", and maybe realistically a design like Hurd would never be able to take over the world like Linux, but it always seemed cooler to me.
I honestly didn't really realize that they were still working on Hurd. Does anyone here use it for anything?
If you're interested in what's going on with GNU in general, GUIX is awesome. It's a package manager like Nix but purely GNU (using GNU Guile scheme). It's developed in tandem with the GNU Shepherd init system (instead of sysvinit/systemd/openrc/etc.) and there are distributions based on GNU Hurd kernel (or the Linux-libre kernel).
Wikipedia has a pretty good rundown [3] but I recommend booting up a VM image. It's actually quite beautiful. I love the purity of GNOME on a GNU/Hurd system with GUIX and Shepherd where the whole thing is configured in guile[4]. There's just something very aesthetic about the combination. I wish I could use it as my daily driver.
2. https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/manual/shepherd.html
I think of Plan 9 practically every day but I'm only reminded approximately once every few years to the existence of Hurd.
one of the GNU/Hurd maintainers is a neighbor .. he is over 70 now, with degree in physics from a top-ranked US university, most of his days are spent dealing with serious health problems.
Has anyone compared the HarmonyOS NEXT to Debian Hurd?
HarmonyOS NEXT is the world's most widely used microkernel system, reportedly used on approximately 800 million systems.
To think Linus wrote linux to be a "good enough" solution until hurd was ready.
The entire hurd system is a literal metaphor for how waiting till you're perfect means you'll never be good enough.
At the risk of getting downvoted, I think hurd is cooked at this point. It certainly has some solid ideas that could live on in a modern system. They should retry rewriting it in rust (or zig) and at least have the opportunity to catch mindshare with new engineers just dabbling in systems engineering.
I tried to get a copy of GNU Hurd via git a few weeks ago and it didn’t work. Can someone post a working repository link?
The HURD has been around for a while, and its architecture is archaic. It's from a world where Mach is the microkernel, and thus microkernels are slow.
There's many more options[0] these days.
It would be cool to have a Hurd project with a verified microkernel like seL4.
AI is getting good enough to help with the verification process and having a hardened kernel would guard a bit better than the current strategy of using containers everywhere.
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD should be revived.
There is an attempt to rewrite GNU Mach
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5490-mach...
I have not followed Hurd since ~2010 when development stalled, what is the purpose of Hurd at this point? Is it just hobbyists having fun and exploring the possibilities or are they still trying to become a viable option or something else or a little of a bunch of things? I think I will try installing Debian GNU/Hurd on an old laptop, always wanted to play with Hurd but I never succeeded in getting any computer I had to boot up with it and never had interest in running OSes in VMs.
Years ago I was met with derisive laughter from everyone when I said Haiku would hit 1.0 before Hurd. I also said that Haiku would beat linux to the opensource desktop widely used by the average person who is not concerned with opensource, but I think that was mostly stirring the pot because of the reaction to my previous statement. All these years later and Haiku hitting 1.0 seems inevitable and even the idea of it becoming a widely adopted opensource OS does not seem that far fetched. I would like to see Hurd hit 1.0, but I am fairly skeptical at this point.
I suppose ChromeOS/linux beat Haiku to the punch for the opensource desktop, but I think I will stick to my guns on this one and play semantics, many in the linux/oss view ChromeOS as linux/oss in name only. A cheat but I think Haiku has earned it.
Edit: Forgot that Chomium was opensource but ChromeOS is not, so I guess I had no need to play semantics.
Huh... the 64-bit release is news to me. I thought GNU Hurd was 32-bit only?
Is it still XNU/OSF-1 inspired? Are people running it on actual metal?
Interesting! I ran some version of Hurd back in 1998, with ip masquerading and forwarding through a dial-up capable Linux box.
And now it's 64bit!?
Is any new operating system is able to emerge nowadays ?
each week there are (in C, in Rust, in JS...)
What are their hardware support ?
at best they can run in a virtual machine
End of debate.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1508/
Dead link, at least for me.
... also, they're still working on Hurd?
At this point investing time (or money) into RedoxOS[1] would be more rational.
There are "they"s coming up repeatedly in this discussion.
I think that it's important to remember that Debian Hurd is not some massive project with thousands of anonymous people behind it. Like Tribblix and Peter Tribble, Debian Hurd's driving force is someone whom you can name: Samuel Thibault.
And although there are a few others that appear on the debian-hurd mailing list from time to time, it is amply clear that this is one of those (many) projects with a core group of very few dedicated people, with very limited resources for development and testing. There is no many hands making light work, here.
This isn't Debian as you may know it for other kernels. (-:
* https://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2025/07/maillist.html
So, in some ways, if microkernels interest you, Debian Hurd is a place to contribute where the ground has yet to be completely trodden.