Just for a bit of fun I have set up a VM running Debian GNU/Hurd 2017 edition just to see what it will do. The installer is pretty much the same as the ones that come with regular Debian and quite similar to the text mode installer for Xubuntu. Like the regular Debian installs you have a choice of GUI, out of which I chose Xfce for familiarity. I downloaded the Netinstall image to create the VM, and unsurprisingly for something that is pre-release, there is only one repository, in the Netherlands. Downloads from this are quite slow so it took a while to get all the files needed for the install, as a Netinstall image (equivalent to a mini installer for Xubuntu) is a 159MB ISO that only contains what is needed to get the install running to the point where the rest of the install can be downloaded from a repository.
Debian GNU/Hurd is quite interesting as the only well supported and current open source operating system based on the Mach microkernel. There is a very well known proprietary Mach based system called macOS (OS X) which is probably the best known and really the only commercially successful implementation of Mach. It would seem that the purported benefits of microkernels have not captivated widespread support in the IT community at large, except when it has been forcefed to users of Mac computers.
The Google homepage in Midori, the default browser installed with Xfce on Debian GNU/Hurd.
I don't expect to spend a lot of time playing with this, it is academic interest only but it would be interesting to see what it could do in future.
