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Plan 9 Desktop Guide

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Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#11
post #5

This is by far the most comprehensive Plan 9 walkthrough I've read in the past couple of years. I've been running a Raspberry Pi as an all-in-one Plan 9 setup for a long while now (as a sort of catch-all minimalist dev environment/console), and the two main showstoppers for me have been: - The reliance on a three button mouse, which makes it impossible to use Plan 9 on a modern laptop without finagling with modifier…

I've only been trying Plan 9 (via 9front) the past few days, just in a VM, but I agree about the mouse. My mouse hand cramps up very easily, and I've become so accustomed to keyboard driven interfaces (I use dwm as my window manager, for example) it almost feels weird using a mouse so much.

Definitely a very interesting system though.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#12
This is worse than retrocomputing; it's necrocomputing, a pathetic attempt to mate with the corpse of a dead concept operating system. Instead of drawing any interesting lessons from Plan 9 for OS and distributed system design, it's an attempt to turn a burned-out wreck into a daily driver, generally by redefining driving as "sitting in a car and making brrr noises".

They are remarkably honest about it: "There is no advanced auto-completion of program names and flags, like hipster zsh and fish users might be accustomed to. But this really isn't an issue since Plan 9 has virtually no programs or flags to speak of, as you will discover soon enough."

Those with any kind of spidey sense for going down tech rabbit holes might also notice how front-and-center features for, ummn, connecting/emulating computers not running Plan 9 are in this guide.

Randomly cutting into the document presents you with a plethora of the usual fetishization of the fact that a nearly useless operating system, window manager, etc. doesn't take nearly as many LoC as something that more than a handful of people use, not to mention a giant list of things that you apparently shouldn't do, like use files made in Office: "There are a great many office suits (sic) on most operating systems, and other office utilities besides too numerous to count. So many are the choices in fact that it's easy to forget that "office" is just a fancy word for working with text."

It seems to close on some daft explication of how everything can be a database and how you don't need a real one, presumably after having invested thousands of words on how you don't need a spreadsheet, don't need a web browser, don't need an office suite, etc.

I cannot think of anything that captures the spirit of Plan 9 less than attempting to revive a dead, nearly 30 year old operating system and pretend that it's a useful daily driver. At the time Plan 9 was built it was a quirky and clean take on technology of the time, built on cutting edge and interesting hardware. At a time when distributed systems in Unix (not really Linux, then) were a tooth-grinding exercise in frozen NFS mounts and awkward, irritating incompatibilities, Plan 9 was a breath of fresh air. Honoring its spirit would be building a new operating system that applies this kind of simplicity to modern hardware (a hell of a task) - and learns from its mistakes, not trying to set up a homestead in this utter wreck.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#13
Been using 9front on a Raspberry pi for many months as my primary coding environment.

Thinking about getting a better workstation for it, but so far, there's no real problem using a raspberry pi. (and you just don't need a ton of resources to make it work really well!)

This article is great and has very few errors. I won't point any out as they'd just be some old curmudgeonly person pointing out historical inaccuracies that don't really matter that much to a "here's how you can use Plan 9/9front".

Really nice!

I've been particularly excited about Plan 9 and 9front since the MIT licensing that happened this year. Great outcome, and I wish it'd have happened 10 years sooner!

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#14
post #5

This is by far the most comprehensive Plan 9 walkthrough I've read in the past couple of years. I've been running a Raspberry Pi as an all-in-one Plan 9 setup for a long while now (as a sort of catch-all minimalist dev environment/console), and the two main showstoppers for me have been: - The reliance on a three button mouse, which makes it impossible to use Plan 9 on a modern laptop without finagling with modifier…

I've only been trying Plan 9 (via 9front) the past few days, just in a VM, but I agree about the mouse. My mouse hand cramps up very easily, and I've become so accustomed to keyboard driven interfaces (I use dwm as my window manager, for example) it almost feels weird using a mouse so much. Definitely a very interesting system though.

Some people in the community are playing around with a rio replacement.

https://shithub.us/sigrid/riow/HEAD/info.html

This has some keyboard shortcuts etc.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#15

This is worse than retrocomputing; it's necrocomputing, a pathetic attempt to mate with the corpse of a dead concept operating system. Instead of drawing any interesting lessons from Plan 9 for OS and distributed system design, it's an attempt to turn a burned-out wreck into a daily driver, generally by redefining driving as "sitting in a car and making brrr noises". They are remarkably honest about it: "There is no…

I'm reminded of the rant given by Billy Madison during the academic decathlon.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#16

This is worse than retrocomputing; it's necrocomputing, a pathetic attempt to mate with the corpse of a dead concept operating system. Instead of drawing any interesting lessons from Plan 9 for OS and distributed system design, it's an attempt to turn a burned-out wreck into a daily driver, generally by redefining driving as "sitting in a car and making brrr noises". They are remarkably honest about it: "There is no…

I'm reminded of the rant given by Billy Madison during the academic decathlon.

Let's watch that movie in a WSL2 machine from the Windows partition :)

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#17

This is worse than retrocomputing; it's necrocomputing, a pathetic attempt to mate with the corpse of a dead concept operating system. Instead of drawing any interesting lessons from Plan 9 for OS and distributed system design, it's an attempt to turn a burned-out wreck into a daily driver, generally by redefining driving as "sitting in a car and making brrr noises". They are remarkably honest about it: "There is no…

Yeah, but they have Glenda.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#18
post #9
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually found Inferno a lot more interesting than Plan 9. Dis is very, very neat, and I sort of wish we had modern runtimes for it.

Same here, another similar endveour around the time was the Amiga reboot attempt as TAO, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-ami... https://www.eetimes.com/amiga-reborn-via-tao-alliance/

First time about TAO, was in EDGE magazine in the early 90s IIRC about their OS TAOS sounded something from the future , could run on different processor even over a network, they had it running on a machine using transputers. It looked like sci-fi to me.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#19
post #6
post #5

This is by far the most comprehensive Plan 9 walkthrough I've read in the past couple of years. I've been running a Raspberry Pi as an all-in-one Plan 9 setup for a long while now (as a sort of catch-all minimalist dev environment/console), and the two main showstoppers for me have been: - The reliance on a three button mouse, which makes it impossible to use Plan 9 on a modern laptop without finagling with modifier…

It's probably unfair to compare Plan9 to "modern" operating systems. Why not talk about everything it got right and smart instead of all the things which behave differently than what our expectations set?

The strong point of plan9 is the universal IPC. This kills the need for a separate clients and servers that communicate with their own protocols to get access to remote resource. You can simply import / export anything, this isn't limited to static content as daemons can also export virtual resources. It also makes lots of programs unnecessary as traditional shell tools can access and modify resources and even system settings. Sort of like sysfs on linux but more on steroids.

Plan9 was also far ahead with sandboxing by having namespaces, which means you can expose restricted views of the "filesystem" to each process. Since in plan9 there's no ioctls and every resource access is simply read/write syscall (even networking!), restricting the "filesystem" is all you need to restrict what a process can do on your system.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#20
post #8
post #4

A Plan 9 site that actually talks about Inferno as well, there is some hope after all.

I've actually found Inferno a lot more interesting than Plan 9. Dis is very, very neat, and I sort of wish we had modern runtimes for it.

What do you see as significant advantages of Dis over WASM? [edit: my guess would be channel support, but it would be interesting to hear more about that]
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