Don’t want to rely on other’s opinions about the Hurd? How to run your own GNU Hurd, in 140 letters:

wget http://people.debian.org/~sthibault/hurd-i386/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz; tar xf de*hu*gz; qemu-system-x86_64 -hda de*hu*g -m 1G

For additional convenience and performance, setup ssh access and enable kvm:

wget http://people.debian.org/~sthibault/hurd-i386/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz; tar xf de*hu*gz; qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -net user,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:2222-:22 -net nic -m 1G -drive cache=writeback,file=$(ls de*hu*g)

⇒ login: root, no pw needed. Set a password for user demo:

passwd demo

⇒ log into your Hurd via ssh:

ssh demo@localhost -p 2222

That’s it: You run the Hurd. You you would want to do that? See cat translator_intro — and much more.

Additional information:

• README
• hurd/running/qemu
• Technical Advantages of the Hurd
• Instant Hurd Development Environment
• QEMU