Comment by donnachangstein

17 hours ago

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.

6 comments

donnachangstein

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dxroshan  15 hours ago

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.

  • k__  13 hours ago

    If it can run nginx and node.js on a VPS it could be a nice alternative to Linux.

    • shakna  12 hours ago

      The current Debian/Hurd port of nginx is outdated, but runs fine.

      There's been a few problems with nodejs, as libfuse compatibility isn't the latest yet. Some libraries work fine. Some explode. So you'll have to compile it yourself.

      Python and Go, however, should run out of the box just fine.

blendergeek  10 hours ago

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