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Plan 9 Desktop Guide

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Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#81

Post by glangdale »

witheld wrote: post #68
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…

Operating systems grinded to a halt a decade before Plan 9 came out. I wish what you were saying was true, I wish that I didn't have to use a teletype emulator on Linux with no real mouse support, I wish I could do unprivileged resource organization (I'll give you ten minutes to try 'unshare', bind mounts, and "unionfs" on Linux before giving up). It is pathetic that operating systems have remained crap for 30 years,…

Starting with a stripped-out Linux kernel and a standard toolchain (whether gcc or clang) would start you light-years ahead of Plan 9 and still permit you to do the kind of research a lot of us (including former 9fans) would love to see. This really depends on an expansive view of "operating systems" (i.e. kernel + a lot of other stuff), but most of what you're saying is not exclusively the domain of the most privileged code.

As a bonus, you'd get a vast array of device drivers and be able to run actual computer programs used by more than a handful of people, which I hear is neat for attempting to build an innovative research operating system with some relevance.

I'm not going to argue that a standard Linux distribution is not a giant mountain of cruft, but imo it's the user space and system software that's alarming, not the kernel per se. And to the extent that the kernel is crufty: well, it's supporting orders of magnitude more things that Plan 9 ever did, and that's a good thing.

I share your irritation at all the things you outline, but you don't need to be running a wacky Thompson C codebase on top of an old kernel to fix any of these things.

I'm also far from convinced that there's any aspect of the Plan 9 design that should be accepted uncritically for a clean sheet new OS design. Saying "nothing has moved forward" is hyperbole, and plenty of things have changed since 1990, even if we accept your claim about OS stagnation as a given. I'm far from convinced that the insights of the Plan 9 guys circa 1989 are so wonderful and timeless that they are better than what could be done with a clean sheet design on top of modern hardware and a minimalist Linux kernel now.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#82

Post by jpm9 »

glangdale wrote: post #80
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…

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…

If you want POSIX you know where to find it.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#83

Post by glangdale »

the_only_law wrote: post #71
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 unles…

It's not just a guide on how to do things with an operating system; it frequently veers off into the usual bizarre stuff about how no-one really needs proper office suites, databases, browsers, etc. In that, it's an encapsulation of the worst things about Plan 9. It was already dumb to go on like than in 1994; it's ridiculous in 2021.

I'm deeply affected by this because I loved Plan 9 in 1992-1994. I wrote multiple user level file servers for my silly honours project and for summer research projects. I built compiler passes for Thompson C while I was at the Labs between ugrad and starting my PhD (mixed caller save, callee save register allocation and a retargeting to the R4000). I wanted it to succeed because of the things that were good about it - but even then was starting to realize how worrying the NIH stuff in Plan 9 was. I started CMU still wanting to talk to people about Plan 9, but it didn't last.

My complaint comes from disappointment: Plan 9 was exciting because it was a clean sheet design, coming from the best judgement of a bunch of very smart people looking around at what was going on with hardware and software in around 1989. People poking the corpse now are working in the opposite of that spirit.

Everyone is free to do what they want, of course (I'd love to fire up a Commodore 64 or an Amiga!) but it feels like a tremendous waste of time to me (subjectively, of course).

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#84

Post by pjmlp »

Cloudef wrote: post #19
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?

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…

No it wasn't.

UNIX world had sandboxing via stuff like Tru64 and HP-UX vaults, while the cloud kind stuff kind of traces back to IBM System 360 capabilities, later improved in z/VM.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#85

Post by pjmlp »

jhbadger wrote: post #76
ThinkBeat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Mostly because VMS was commercial and UNIX free beer.

History would have played quite differently had AT&T been allowed to sell UNIX from the get go.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#86

Post by glangdale »

jpm9 wrote: post #82
glangdale wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you want POSIX you know where to find it.

If P9 had been able to run a reasonable number of computer programs not written by people at the Labs, it might have survived or at least been more influential beyond "UTF-8, some odd remnant uses of 9P, and /dev/proc". The gratuitous incompatibility assured that the other interesting ideas were buried.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#87

Post by nix23 »

pjmlp wrote: post #84
Cloudef wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No it wasn't. UNIX world had sandboxing via stuff like Tru64 and HP-UX vaults, while the cloud kind stuff kind of traces back to IBM System 360 capabilities, later improved in z/VM.

>cloud kind stuff kind of traces back to IBM System 360 capabilities

Yes true with VM/370 (today called z/VM) released in 1972, but it's not directly the same, however pretty impressive what IBM did (in the past)

One can test-drive it from here:

http://www.vm370.org/vm

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#88

Post by nix23 »

gonzus wrote: post #10
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?

I want to answer trying to interpret the GP. For me, I want to be able to tinker with Plan 9. I love everything I have read about it. But I also need a practical environment where this is possible. I would love to be able to do minimal (frugal?) development work on a pi running Plan 9, but the lack of a browser, an editor that feels familiar (at least for a while, until I learn the ropes) and the languages I want to…

Try 9Front, they have two browsers ;)

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#89

Post by witheld »

glangdale wrote: post #81
witheld wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Operating systems grinded to a halt a decade before Plan 9 came out. I wish what you were saying was true, I wish that I didn't have to use a teletype emulator on Linux with no real mouse support, I wish I could do unprivileged resource organization (I'll give you ten minutes to try 'unshare', bind mounts, and "unionfs" on Linux before giving up). It is pathetic that operating systems have remained crap for 30 years,…

Starting with a stripped-out Linux kernel and a standard toolchain (whether gcc or clang) would start you light-years ahead of Plan 9 and still permit you to do the kind of research a lot of us (including former 9fans) would love to see. This really depends on an expansive view of "operating systems" (i.e. kernel + a lot of other stuff), but most of what you're saying is not exclusively the domain of the most privile…

I'm not interested in any capitalist perspective of an OS- this kind of thinking is exactly why I'm using a damn teletype emulator. Profitable, "successful" computing that gets more than "a handful" of users is web tech. They can keep it.

I'll just stop at the top- no, I can't use Linux as a base, except perhaps as a host for a virtual system. For me I've been playing with uxn, but Inferno does exist. And you're right, using Inferno on a stripped Linux system WOULD be better than using Linux.

Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide

#90

Post by Karrot_Kream »

witheld wrote: post #89
glangdale wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting with a stripped-out Linux kernel and a standard toolchain (whether gcc or clang) would start you light-years ahead of Plan 9 and still permit you to do the kind of research a lot of us (including former 9fans) would love to see. This really depends on an expansive view of "operating systems" (i.e. kernel + a lot of other stuff), but most of what you're saying is not exclusively the domain of the most privile…

I'm not interested in any capitalist perspective of an OS- this kind of thinking is exactly why I'm using a damn teletype emulator. Profitable, "successful" computing that gets more than "a handful" of users is web tech. They can keep it. I'll just stop at the top- no, I can't use Linux as a base, except perhaps as a host for a virtual system. For me I've been playing with uxn, but Inferno does exist. And you're righ…

How is an OS "capitalist"? What...?
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