Samuel Thibault offered up a status update on the current state of GNU/Hurd from a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM 2026. Thibault has previously shared updates on GNU Hurd from the annual FOSDEM event while this year’s was a bit more optimistic thanks to recent driver progress and more software now successfully building for Hurd.
GNU/Hurd continues to lag behind the Linux kernel and other modern platforms for hardware driver support. But driver support for Hurd has been improving thanks to NetBSD’s rump layer.
I think microkernel’s are weird but everything I hear does seem to imply they are better then what we currently have. That being said, “microkernel’s are the future” is a pretty old take now and I don’t know any OS that has one.
Linux is monolithic. Windows is somehow monolithic, bloated and extremely minimal. Don’t know about apple but I would guess they’re also monolithic since they are old and Unix based and that combination generally means monolithic.
MacOS’ XNU kernel is derived from the Mach microkernel, the same one on which Hurd is built. (Or at least approximately the same, since apparently there were various editions of Mach.)
Look at my other comment, there’s something cooking at GNU, idk but i’m hyped. I think Windows and MacOS (darwin/XNU) are hybrids, some parts in userspace, other parts in the kernel.
Edit: the macos kernel