Phoronix reports that version 0.6 of GNU Hurd has been released. Before getting too excited about GNU Hurd, it's still bound to x86 32-bit and doesn't offer any compelling new features.
GNU Hurd 0.6 has "numerous cleanups and stylistic fixes" to the code-base, the message dispatching code in Hurd servers is now better, there's support for protected payloads of GNU March 1.5+, libz/libz2 are used as the decompressors to replace gz/bz2, the native fakeroot has improved, the performance of the integer hashing library has improved, and the init server has been split into the start-up server and a SysVinit-style program. The procfs and random translators were also merged.
More details on the new GNU Hurd release can be found via the 0.6 release announcement issued by Thomas Schwinge.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mmcmonster on Saturday April 18 2015, @12:29AM
The answer is Critical Mass...
Not in the number of individuals using the OS or even developers per se. But once an OS is able to bootstrap itself on modern hardware and run enough hardware drivers so that a desktop can be compiled, then you've made it.
That being said, it's taking a long time for HURD to come along. Long enough that the initial developers could have mated, had children, have them grow up and learn programming, have them help develop the OS, and have them mate and have more kids. :-(
Still, can't wait until they port KDE over. :-)