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Plan 9 Desktop Guide

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Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#71

Post by the_only_law »

glangdale wrote: post #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…

And you are so deeply affected by this why?

It’s just a guide on how to do things with an operating system. The author isn’t even really advocating it’s use as a daily driver, just providing instruction for how to do so, if someone was so inclined. There’s nothing in there that’s warrants a multi-paragraph whining about OP is using something.

There seems to be a very negative option towards retrocomputing on HN unless it related to bitching about electron or resource usage, but this is the most virile I’ve seen it.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#72

Post by butterisgood »

Koshkin wrote: post #46
shadowgovt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've decided to vouch it, but as basic criticism: the purpose of this site is intellectual curiosity, and criticizing Plan 9 as "dead" is the opposite of intellectual curiosity. Even dead things are worth studying, if for no other reason than to explore the question of why everyone isn't using them (in Plan 9's case, it has a lot more to do with accident of history than any technical limitations... Once POSIX standar…

The rant was about making Plan 9 out as something potentially useful as a daily driver.

And here I sit, using it daily, and productively.

Strange that.

I will agree it's not for everyone, but I still wouldn't put my mom on Linux either (not for a desktop... absolutely not).

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#73

Post by butterisgood »

georgeoliver wrote: post #50
iszomer wrote: post #34

SDF recently started hosting a Plan 9 bootcamp. https://sdf.org/plan9

Love this idea! Plan9 wants a network Plan9 wants to be distributed Plan9 wants a community I've always heard about Plan9's networking, does this include having good leverage for tasks like audio streaming?

People were just streaming to twitch from 9front not very long ago (within the last month).

So I assume so.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#74

Post by butterisgood »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #29

I really wish this would have become a major force. It has a lot of great architecture that would make it a preferred platform in these "cloud", "distributed" ways. Smack Erlang and Elxir on it and you got something.

Someone's working on Zig, but I'm not sure how much time they have.

Also, if I had more time, I'd get Zig working on it too.

There's always Go, and it works pretty well too!

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#75

Post by lizknope »

anthk wrote: post #65
lizknope wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_is_a_file Why is the socket interface the way it is? Why isn't it like /dev/tcp in bash? I tried Plan 9 about 10 years ago. Since then I use VPNs everyday and it can be tricky to setup at times. The Plan 9 concept of just importing /net from the VPN machine as a union overlay is so elegant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Combinin...

>Why is the socket interface the way it is? Why isn't it like /dev/tcp in bash? That's wrong. /dev/tcp or /dev/udp should be devices themselves, not a fake one for bash.

I know the one in bash is fake but I'm saying that /dev/tcp and /dev/udp could be filesystems like /dev or /proc

Open /dev/tcp/google.com/80 or /dev/tcp/192.168.1.1/22 or whatever.

Instead of having your web server start as root and then do some UID switching to drop priveleges why not have it start as a non priveleged user from the beginning?

The ports under 1024 are reserved for root but how about we get rid of that and have files for every port number? Then use chown and chmod to set permissions and only let the httpd user account read and write to port 80?

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#76

Post by jhbadger »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #28
Kototama wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Plan9 is a more "modern" operating systems than UNIX. WindowsNT is also a more modern operating system than UNIX. In so far as when they were created long after UNIX. And Plan9 certainly was at some point hoped to be a successor. That did not happen. and the new ideas they had.

Although Windows NT was in many ways a version of the operating system VMS that failed against UNIX including having the same main architect, Dave Cutler, who hated everything about UNIX and who refused to learn from its success. Plan 9 on the other hand was created by some of the very same people who created UNIX. It learned from UNIX and while it failed, it failed because to most people UNIX was "good enough" and the improvements of Plan 9 weren't compelling enough to switch.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#77

Post by ori_b »

codedokode wrote: post #54

Here is what I thought after reading an article: Linux should provide an API for drivers. So that the drivers can be reused by other OS like FreeBSD or Plan9. If you are making a new OS, it is prohibitively expensive to reinvent the USB stack, write your own ACPI interpreter or port millions of lines of code. There should be an API, otherwise these drivers don't differ much from proprietary drivers. Other OS like Win…

The millions of lines of code aren't inherent to the problem.

Here's the 9front ACPI interpreter:

http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/lib...

And the USB stack, user and kernel side:

http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/cmd... http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/p... http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/p...

Even the complex drivers, like wifi, are relatively small:

http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/HEAD/sys/src/9/p...

Linux code is unpleasant. I don't want to deal with it.

Give me clear, well-written docs instead. Of course, since that never happens, we just end up reading the linux code and reimplementing it in a way that's acceptably clean.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#78

Post by anthk »

lizknope wrote: post #75
anthk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why is the socket interface the way it is? Why isn't it like /dev/tcp in bash? That's wrong. /dev/tcp or /dev/udp should be devices themselves, not a fake one for bash.

I know the one in bash is fake but I'm saying that /dev/tcp and /dev/udp could be filesystems like /dev or /proc Open /dev/tcp/google.com/80 or /dev/tcp/192.168.1.1/22 or whatever. Instead of having your web server start as root and then do some UID switching to drop priveleges why not have it start as a non priveleged user from the beginning? The ports under 1024 are reserved for root but how about we get rid of tha…

Plan9 doesn't work like that, you have a /net equivalent per namespace.

https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/names

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#79

Post by glangdale »

tcmart14 wrote: post #61
glangdale wrote: post #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…

I think in order to achieve your final point, these kinds of things are necessary. I agree that it would be great to see a project that revives the core concepts of Plan9 in a modern sense, however, you have to attract people and give them a baseline for what that is. You do that by introducing people to Plan9. Talk about its features and how it does things. Stir enough interest then go, "Hey, lets either take the co…

There's a huge distinction between reviving the spirit of Plan 9 and reviving the ideas. Trying to retroactively revive the direction of an experimental early-90s OS to intercept 2020-era hardware is goofy. Computers are very different now than they were then; surely some of the things invented in the past 30 years might influence OS design?

The thing that still appeals to me about Plan 9 as a concept - is the willingness to do a clean-sheet design and not be bound by the way that everyone else is doing things.

A better design would also not fetishize uselessness. It's one thing to have a cool environment but it's quite another to point-blank refuse to maintain a compatibility layer that allows people to run significant programs that people want to use. Plan 9 didn't have to allow the APE (ANSI POSIX Environment, a project from Howard Trickey) to run down into uselessness.

There are a lot of interesting system design questions that arise from letting people use computers the way they want to, for 2021 workloads. I think we probably know how to let people use shell, ed/vi/emacs/... and cc to make hand-built astronomy databases and manually paint a time of day clock into a window. But you don't get to find out the demands of modern computing without having enough compatibility layers to let someone run a database or a reasonably-complete 3D engine or a web browser on your system.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#80

Post by glangdale »

shadowgovt wrote: post #41
Koshkin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I wish I could unflag it.

I've decided to vouch it, but as basic criticism: the purpose of this site is intellectual curiosity, and criticizing Plan 9 as "dead" is the opposite of intellectual curiosity. Even dead things are worth studying, if for no other reason than to explore the question of why everyone isn't using them (in Plan 9's case, it has a lot more to do with accident of history than any technical limitations... Once POSIX standar…

My criticism of Plan 9 as dead is realism, not intellectual incuriosity. Speaking of intellectual incuriosity, I find it astonishing that people are still poking the corpse in an effort to turn it into a daily driver, rather than discussing the insights that made P9 fresh at the time or attempting to discover and apply similar insights today.

Also intellectually incurious: assuming that P9 expired due to POSIX eating its lunch. My personal take on it is that P9 expired partly due to bad licensing decisions but mainly due to a preposterously shitty attitude to Other People's Code. I vividly remember people in the Unix room clustered around the one Windows machine there that could do radical stuff like "run games" and "run a browser". If just a bit more effort had been put into Howard Trickey's APE Plan 9 might well have kept evolving and become useful, but NIH was more important. Or "Invented Here, But Not By The Right People" (C++).

POSIX could have been an asset to Plan 9 - a target to track instead of having to emulate a bunch of disparate Unixen.

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