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Hurd any day now, right?

I do wonder what this landscape could have looked like if all of the effort had gone behind a Mach-based microkernel. I read all of the back and forth between Tanenbaum and Torvalds. At the time, I was just so excited to see "free and open" winning.

I should specify that the XNU Kernel from Darwin/OSX took a lot of my attention when it first premiered.

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Hurd works in the same sense that OpenBSD works. It has very limited hardware support so you'll likely have to run it in a VM, but it does work.

If you're willing to split your workload into VMs in the first place I think application-level segmentation like Qubes starts to become a more interesting idea that microkernels.

There is a lot of flexibility that you get from microkernels outside of isolation that you don't get from virtual machines. I'm not suggesting use one GNU/Hurd VM for one application (similar to what you would get with Qubes). I'm suggesting using one GNU/Hurd VM for many applications.

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