HN Explorer

Ask HN: Has anyone used a HURD-based system before?

2 points by bananicorn ↗ HN
I'm just curious, maybe someone tried it for development purposes, or just to mess around?

Honestly, if Arch/Hurd was ready, I'd have tried it myself. The most usable distro is probably Debian/HURD, has anyone used that, and if yes - is there an immediately noticeable difference in how the system performs/feels?

And is it really that big of a deal that it's only 32 bit at the moment? (Yeah it limits the maximum usable RAM, but otherwise?)

3 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 8.7 ms ] thread
qubex
Yes, I've messed with it (most recently in a virtual machine about a year ago). But then again, in the same time-frame I've also "messed with" Plan9, BeOS-recreation Haiku, and several other oddballs.

Hurd works, but then again so do a lot of other things. I very much like the philosophy of micro-kernels and everything-else-implemented-by-a-server, but in practice (perhaps just because of unlucky timing combined with performance penalties) that hasn't (yet?) caught on.

(I used the Debian distribution.)

bananicorn
Did you install it on hardware or in a VM?

And damn, I've always wanted to give Plan9 a shot too, mainly just because I really like the "Everything is a file" approach^^

edit:

formatting

maybe -> mainly

qubex
> Did you install it in hardware or in a VM?

>> (most recently in a virtual machine about a year ago)