It is unlikely that this will ever take off.

As I understand it, the idea of this project is to build a microkernel and associated systems that might compete as an alternative to the Linux kernel.

This would allow things like, more elegant hot patching of the kernel, formal verification of core parts of the kernel, better hardware enforced isolation of different systems for security. I guess also some people like the idea of a GPL3 kernel against tivoisation.

I can see why someone might adopt a mature version of this for say, a safety or security critical system. Trouble is, until it is mature and battle tested, its not a good bet for those things. And without adoption, it's not gonna mature or get used.

It's technically interesting and competition is never bad.

A fringe operating system can drive innovation by taking risks that a mainstream OS would never. Ultimately any improvements will appear on main stream operating systems so even if it's never used we're going to see some benefits.

I agree. Given the massive success of BSD opensource L4, I think the only reason for Hurd's continued claim is its association with Stallman. Are there any technical merits here?

The translators feature is pretty awesome.

The niceness of the Hurd design, conceptually, is that the microkernel orchestrates system integrity, while even an unprivileged user has a lot of freedom as to what to run on top of that. They can launch drivers, file systems, run sandboxed kernels, and so forth.

we don't want til 2060 https://xkcd.com/1508/