Plan 9 is a Uniquely Complete Operating System
37 points by runxiyu
37 points by runxiyu
ehem, well the only thing that list really lacks that I need is a modern web browser :(
yes man but please get rid of those 3 button chords and replace them with gestures that naturally function on a buttonless trackpad. then someone please update the go port.
about the browser mentioned in a previous comment... i slowly feel more and more estranged from the browser. it has its place on a consumer platform (an ipad or such), but i feel that i go increasingly long productive stretches without touching a browser. because... why should i? stack exchange is gone, search is gone mostly, etc. etc.
If someone is going to take the time to use an OS like Plan 9, then they will not mind spending $10 on a decent mouse. I far prefer almost any mouse to a buttonless trackpad, and wouldn't buy any laptop with a buttonless trackpad for my own use. I hate the things, and I pretty much hate multi-finger clicks and gestures.
I don't reckon this is likely, nor do I think they should.
If you want to work on that, happy to take patches. I personally don't need that, but the pinephone port will need some overlapping work to be usable, and the people working on it would certainly appreciate helping hands.
yes man but please get rid of those 3 button chords and replace them with gestures that naturally function on a buttonless trackpad. then someone please update the go port.
Hm, you could also try using extra modifier keys on your keyboard, although that might not necessarily be ergonomic. What gestures would you suggest? At least in its current form, you'd need to be able to select/execute/plumb text, and also snarf and paste, all with the pointing device. I suspect you do want to change this in its entirety.
about the browser mentioned in a previous comment... i slowly feel more and more estranged from the browser. it has its place on a consumer platform (an ipad or such), but i feel that i go increasingly long productive stretches without touching a browser. because... why should i? stack exchange is gone, search is gone mostly, etc. etc.
I do have to use web browsers for large swaths of research, to be honest. And increasingly websites don't allow access with netsurf/mothra/abaco due to bot protection such as anubis.
Is anyone here running Plan 9 directly on hardware these days?
My main issues, apart from missing the browser, have always been that I am missing drivers. Having never written driver before for any OS I don't really know how to contribute when I run into that situation.
I used Plan 9 infrequently many years ago but haven't tried using it seriously in the last several years, even from a VM. But I like the aesthetics, both visual and philosophical. I never was able to figure out keyfs though.
I recently tried the Anvil editor but ran into some weird keyboard behavior on Mac OS. But it looks very promising.
Yeah, I am. I have a Thinkpad X61 dual-booting 9front (on gefs) and Alpine Linux (on zfs) that I've been using a lot lately. I've been overwhelmingly using it for Alpine, though. (It has pretty crazy good performance -- the battery life is no more than an hour, but I can like, compile Rust code, and watch 1080p videos... made me realize laptops have not actually come all that far in the last 20 years.)
I have 9front installed on it mostly as a curiosity. It was a bit annoying -- the wifi card in the laptop was not supported by OpenBSD (and thus 9front) so I had to get a special card that was on the supported list (wifi cards are cheap though, which is nice) and open it up and install it and... it still didn't work! And rather, crashed the wifi stack. (Seemed to be a 9front bug.)
I did have an external USB adapter that ended up working, but yeah, driver issues kinda suck. It's just a problem of manpower though. I'm not aware of any ideological opposition to supporting hardware (like there is on GNU-y distros). Being entirely developed by hobbyists and having zero practical applications (beyond being fun) just means people will work on what interests them personally...
Once I have some more free time, I'm going to boot back into it and read the manual cover-to-cover. I intend to do quite what this article suggests: use it as a playground for learning operating systems.
Yes. Here's a sample of what some people have booted it on: http://sysinfo.9front.org/
Personally, I run it on an x250, a hacked Chinese x201 (https://www.xyte.ch/mods/x210-x2100/), and a Ryzen 5 desktop.
I have recently started to use 9front on actual hardware, yeah. Everything other than WiFi worked.
Be sure you use 9front instead of classic Plan 9.
I am just amazed to know that Plan9 has a built-in torrent client implementation. My eyes are gleaming.
I've used 9front a bit on bare metal and love it. So coherent. Take a look at the programming model for Acme in particular - it's a lovely example of the "everything is a file" approach.
I'd have switched to it as a daily driver but for the lack of a modern Web browser. Netsurf is almost, but not quite, good enough.
The whole unity of development aspect that the author mentions has its attractive points to be sure, but that's also what makes Plan 9 cut off from most of the rest of the world of software. I'm very curious about the other commenters who say they use Plan 9 regularly; what do you do on it? Much of our computing life is now on the browser, but still, on my main machine (Linux) I have and regularly use: LibreOffice, Blender, FreeCAD. These aren't on Plan 9, I'm pretty sure. What does Plan 9 offer that makes the restricted environment worth it?
In particular, I can see the 9P protocol as a "road not (yet?) traveled" but still with valuable lessons for computing. But the other stuff like the three-button mouse design or the window manager, it seems more gimicky than an obviously superior design full of potential.
if go wouldn't have been abandoned on this platform, it would have a good use case. even so, it survives as a target, so it is possible to easily compile software for this platform in go.
if it were me, i would solve the following pain points in order to "revive" this platform:
last but not least, i would try to discuss the roadmap with the surviving creators. if they accept to get involved (even in a low-effort short-form stance), their roamap vision would be more coherent than a random lobste.rs post.
(*) not that you can't buy a "decent" mouse; it's more that you need a table too to use it. a good design would possibly need to go deep and have some destructive impact on compatibility, and is not something i can come up with with no effort.
Can you elaborate on Go being abandoned? I don't have the context but would like to know more
i love when someone proves me wrong this way. thanks. according to https://go.dev/dl/, plan9 packages are available again, apparently since go 1.21 (2023).
before that, you would have had to boostrap the toolchain and compile yourself, as described here: https://wiki.9front.org/building-go. see also: https://go.dev/wiki/Plan9.