Yeah it's pretty amazing system all things considered. It's kind of as if 8-bit home computer systems continued to evolve, but keep the same principles of being really closely tied to the HW and with very blurry line between kernel and user space. It radiates strong user ownership of the system. If you look at modern systems where you sometimes don't even get superuser privileges (for better of worse) it's quite a contrast.

Which is why it reminds me of Emacs so much. You can mess with most of the internals, there's no major separation between "Emacs-space" and userspace. There are these jokes about Emacs being OS, but it really does remind me of those early days of home computing where you could tinker with low level stuff and there were no guardrails or locks stopping you.

GNU Hurd is going to be mainstream any minute now.