Comment by donnachangstein

18 hours ago

A few months work by one guy and already more capable than the Hurd.

Imagine what you could accomplish given 35 years.

> A few months work by one guy and already more capable than the Hurd

It is no way capable than Hurd. It is a cool project though. Have you used Hurd recently? It can run a modern desktop.

  • I searched YouTube for actual evidence of Hurd booting to a desktop and only found two videos of Hurd freezing during boot, and a third video of RMS explaining to a very confused convention attendee that he's "never installed GNU slash lynn-ox" because he could just ask someone else to do it.

    No videos of Hurd running Doom either, but anyone is welcome to create one and share.

    • The programming interface that Hurd provide is similar to that of any modern operating system. So, it can run pretty much any program that runs on Linux or BSD, but you have to port it. Doom is no exception. If you cannot find a video of Doom running on Hurd on YouTube, it doesn't mean that Hurd can't run Doom.

      Hurd is sure not a successful project, but it is a capable operating system. Linux comes with a lot of device drivers for all sorts of hardware, so Linux nowadays can run almost everywhere. But that is not the case with Hurd because only a small number of people are contributing to this project and it is largely eclipsed by success of Linux. But it is an extensible system so if you want support for a hardware, you can develop a driver for it. But nobody is interested.

      If you haven't seen Hurd running a desktop, I will introduce you to Debian Hurd (https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/18i6e94/de...). It is a Debian distribution with Hurd as the kernel instead of Linux. It comes with Xorg and you can install XFCE, OpenBox. Basically, you can install any desktop that render on CPU. Desktops like GNOME and KDE need more infrastructure. They relay on modern GPUs and uses direct rendering. In Linux, we have DRI and Mesa for this. As of now, Hurd doesn't have any such infrastructure. As I have already said before, a lot of people are contributing to Linux and only a handful of people are contributing to Hurd.

      2 replies →

    • Its been a few years but I ran HURD in a VM and it ran a nice X Windowing system. Its been a few years though so I don't know what HURD is capable of today

Haha not quite at the point Hurd has gotten. I'd be very happy if I could last that long on one project though, I have a tendency to get bored after a few months sadly.

  • > Haha not quite at the point Hurd has gotten

    that's true, you've only shipped to one computer, while they've shipped to dozens!