Samuel Thibault:
The Hurd precisely tries to expose things as files.
On the subject of the world changing since 2014, I really should ask.The last time that I tried Debian Hurd, I couldn't even get it installed. The machine that I was installing on had no network interfaces and didn't need mail, so I told the Debian installer not to install any networking stuff at all and that it had no network interfaces, un-checking all of the checkboxes for mail and the like. The Debian installer dutifully hung partway through the install, saying that it was configuring exim.
The last that I checked, which was a while ago, to work around this and possibly other critical Debian installer problems you yourselves were "installing" Debian Hurd by sharing around a developer's personal machine image with that developer's accounts and stuff already pre-installed. Has this situation improved at all?