Here is another informative post on Oberon, Plan 9, and Inferno:
https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76...
(Much of the Plan 9 UI was borrowed from Oberon.)
Plan 9 Desktop Guide
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Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide
#22Earlier 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.
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]
Its not so much dis but the whole concept of an OS built on top of a VM. This means the entirety of user space is portable across platforms. There is no way to run native code.
It is possible to port wasm to inferno and replace dis. That could open up some interesting possibilities. You could write code in any language, spit out wasm and run it on any cpu/OS via inferno.
Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide
#23This 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…
Whatever suckiness Plan 9 has, it's either incomparable to other systems, or it is not worth caring about, or if it is, something can most likely be done about it with relatively little effort, and if not, you can always run multiple operating systems in parallel.
Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide
#24This 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…
> The reliance on a three button mouse, which makes it impossible to use Plan 9 on a modern laptop without finagling with modifier keys
Some modern laptops which have both a touchpad and a trackpoint or similar have two sets of mouse buttons, with the top one (for the trackpoint) having three buttons. The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackpoint) has a list of models (note however that, for some models, it's optional so you can have it either with or without the trackpoint) and a couple of pictures of these laptops with two sets of mouse buttons.
Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide
#25Here is another informative post on Oberon, Plan 9, and Inferno: https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76... (Much of the Plan 9 UI was borrowed from Oberon.) http://www.projectoberon.com/
> (Much of the Plan 9 UI was borrowed from Oberon.)
The Acme UI is heavily based on Oberon. The current plan 9 UI is Rio, a window multiplexer and manager.
Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide
#26This 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…
Thanks to plan9 we have 9p and UTF-8 today.
Also, rant whatever you want, but importing /net it's far better than all of the IPTABLES NAT crap you have to write in order to have an usable system build on top of stacked crap again and again.
9front is the future, and not that turd based on half baked networked file systems from Sun named NFS, or worse, Java as the 'standard' of enterprise 'computing'.
Don't let me start on X11, Bash having /dev/tcp and so on.
Or having to use VNC instead of X11's forwarding in order to be usable today (Or NX, Xpra...), thus, defying the basic scheme of X11's client/server model.
Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide
#27A Plan 9 site that actually talks about Inferno as well, there is some hope after all.
> there is some hope after all
Inferno was created as a potential Java competitor. That hope is long gone.
Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide
#28This 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?
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.
Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide
#29I 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.
Re: Plan 9 Desktop Guide
#30This 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…
The funny part about this comment is, if one filters out all the bitter and out of place adjectives it reads like you're describing a worthwhile and fun educational exercise.