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Comment by iamsohungry | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have practical experience running GNU Hurd as a personal computing environment? I see they have Debian running on GNU Hurd... if I were to install that on my X200 running with LibreBoot (currently running Trisquel Linux) what would my user experience be like?

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You probably couldn't get it to run on bare metal, what with I don't think Mach handling message-signaled interrupts for PCI, on top of the lack of USB and sound for desktop functionality. It's strictly developed and used in virtualization currently, and the motivation for rump kernel integration is to finally escape the hellish circle of that and relying on old NetDDE drivers, perhaps finally making it an everyday OS.

On the other hand, it is stable enough to serve the Hurd wiki. In addition, it has ~81% of Debian building, it can run Xfce and Firefox... not bad. It's much more than MINIX 3, which is solid but lacking in packages.

yea, i tried to run it on real hardware a couple of years ago, and the response from the community was "no one does that, use virtualization."

i got the sense that it was a friendly group. expressing interest, even as someone who just wanted to play around and see what it was all about, was well-received.

Since you have the luxury of a FSF-blessed laptop, I would recommend trying GuixSD[0]. Transactional package managers are the best thing since sliced bread.

0: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/

Note that while Guix, the package manager, has been successfully ported to the Hurd, GuixSD has not. Still some work to do there, but I invite anyone interested to join in and help it make it happen.

Watching videos from https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/speaker/samuel_thib... it felt like he used as it's main OS[1].

[1] he talked about HURD's advantages for mounting remote iso images, it felt a little too practical not to be something someone experience on his own daily driver.

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