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Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system

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Re: Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system

#11

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

Gualdrapo wrote: post #5
GianFabien wrote: post #2

I've played with Plan9 several times, but never used it seriously. The aesthetics that puts me off. Would have been great if they had taken guidance from BeOS / Haiku-OS for the look and feel. Heck, even Windows 95 would have been an improvement.

Not an expert in OS development whatsoever but I do know that it's not intended for common usage, so how its UI looks is not something devs would take much care of. Though I do know that it puts some strong emphasis on mouse usage, something that for someone that grew to use the keyboard a lot like me (ironically, as a graphic designer) seems to be really awkward, to say the less. Its strengths seem to be its overlay…

Forgive my naïvety, but couldn’t X and CDE be ported over?

Re: Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system

#12

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #11
Gualdrapo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an expert in OS development whatsoever but I do know that it's not intended for common usage, so how its UI looks is not something devs would take much care of. Though I do know that it puts some strong emphasis on mouse usage, something that for someone that grew to use the keyboard a lot like me (ironically, as a graphic designer) seems to be really awkward, to say the less. Its strengths seem to be its overlay…

Forgive my naïvety, but couldn’t X and CDE be ported over?

I thought there was an X server for Plan 9 (edit: yes; https://plan9.io/wiki/plan9/x11_installation/index.html ), but it kinda defeats the point unless you use something like https://github.com/gerstner-hub/xwmfs on it. CDE... something like CDE probably, but actual CDE would be painful and really defeat the point unless you ported its IPC to a Plan 9 native version.

Re: Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system

#13

Post by nrr »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #11
Gualdrapo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an expert in OS development whatsoever but I do know that it's not intended for common usage, so how its UI looks is not something devs would take much care of. Though I do know that it puts some strong emphasis on mouse usage, something that for someone that grew to use the keyboard a lot like me (ironically, as a graphic designer) seems to be really awkward, to say the less. Its strengths seem to be its overlay…

Forgive my naïvety, but couldn’t X and CDE be ported over?

Not trivially. There's a lot in how Plan 9 is put together that makes this a monumental effort.

(That said, there may have been an X server brought in at some point, but don't quote me on that. That's the least of anyone's problems in undertaking a CDE port though.)

Re: Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system

#14

Post by linguae »

GianFabien wrote: post #2

I've played with Plan9 several times, but never used it seriously. The aesthetics that puts me off. Would have been great if they had taken guidance from BeOS / Haiku-OS for the look and feel. Heck, even Windows 95 would have been an improvement.

Plan 9 was heavily influenced by the Xerox PARC Mesa/Cedar interface, which influenced Wirth’s Project Oberon. I forget whether Project Oberon directly influenced Plan 9, but I’ve heard people argue that Rob Pike, one of the leaders of the Plan 9 project at Bell Labs, was heavily influenced by Wirth when it came to programming language design, even if the syntax was closer to C instead of Wirth languages like Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon. With that said, there are major similarities between the interfaces of Cedar/Mesa, Project Oberon, and Plan 9.

A few years ago I thought about what it would take to implement a more conventional desktop GUI on top of Plan 9, but I’ve oscillated back and forth between wanting Plan 9 with a Mac-like desktop versus wanting a modern Lisp/Smalltalk machine (with object-oriented underpinnings instead of Plan 9’s “everything is a file” interfaces) with a Mac-like desktop.

Re: Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system

#15

Post by sfpotter »

ori_b wrote: post #7
kccqzy wrote: post #6

> The Plan 9 implementations tend to not be as feature rich as the proper upstream variants. This is IMO the biggest drawback. Why wouldn't any user want the software to be feature rich? In fact, looking at Plan 9, I often feel that the provided software is just a MVP.

For the same reason people prefer languages like Python over Perl. Simplicity improves usability and understandability. It's pleasant to use a minimalist, viable product. 9front is not the only OS I use, but it is one of my daily drivers.

Python isn't simple.

Re: Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system

#16

Post by linguae »

kccqzy wrote: post #6

> The Plan 9 implementations tend to not be as feature rich as the proper upstream variants. This is IMO the biggest drawback. Why wouldn't any user want the software to be feature rich? In fact, looking at Plan 9, I often feel that the provided software is just a MVP.

Counterpoint: Plan 9 is supposed to be the ultimate realization of the Unix philosophy. One important aspect of the Unix philosophy is composable software. Instead of large, feature-rich programs where functionality is often siloed off from other programs, users have a toolbox of small, composable programs that “do only one thing and do it well” and that they could connect together using pipes and other inter-process communication primitives.

Composable software is something I’m highly interested in. There were efforts in the 1990s to make desktop software more composable, such as COM from Windows and OpenDoc from Apple, but the desktop world is still dominated by large applications such as those that constitute Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Suite. It would have been a wonderful opportunity for the Linux desktop world to embrace components, but, alas, the community embraced OpenOffice, GIMP, and other large applications.

Re: Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system

#17

Post by tbrownaw »

ori_b wrote: post #7
kccqzy wrote: post #6

> The Plan 9 implementations tend to not be as feature rich as the proper upstream variants. This is IMO the biggest drawback. Why wouldn't any user want the software to be feature rich? In fact, looking at Plan 9, I often feel that the provided software is just a MVP.

For the same reason people prefer languages like Python over Perl. Simplicity improves usability and understandability. It's pleasant to use a minimalist, viable product. 9front is not the only OS I use, but it is one of my daily drivers.

Python's `venv` Just Works (and is standard), while whatever it was that I dug up to get the same effect in Perl mostly didn't. I somewhat prefer Perl for things where this isn't an issue.

I should probably make time look again in case I missed something or it's improved in the last decade.

Re: Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system

#19

Post by ori_b »

sfpotter wrote: post #15
ori_b wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason people prefer languages like Python over Perl. Simplicity improves usability and understandability. It's pleasant to use a minimalist, viable product. 9front is not the only OS I use, but it is one of my daily drivers.

Python isn't simple.

Perl is less simple. Though, I suppose lua would be a better comparison.

Re: Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system

#20

Post by ori_b »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #11
Gualdrapo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an expert in OS development whatsoever but I do know that it's not intended for common usage, so how its UI looks is not something devs would take much care of. Though I do know that it puts some strong emphasis on mouse usage, something that for someone that grew to use the keyboard a lot like me (ironically, as a graphic designer) seems to be really awkward, to say the less. Its strengths seem to be its overlay…

Forgive my naïvety, but couldn’t X and CDE be ported over?

You could, but if you want Unix, you already know where to find it.
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