Thats super freaking cool!!!
I didnt know what plan 9 was until i read the comments and then went to wikipedia and mannn its super epic.
Like in 2015 theres videos of a guy porting plan 9 on a raspberry pi!!
I have an RPi4 and a 0W that run 9front as diskless terminals thanks to that effort. It works really well!
Richard Miller is one of the OGs; he did the first port of UNIX, and if you look into Plan 9 more you'll see exactly how much of a connection to history it really is.
It's purely for my own needs — what worked for Rob Pike's eyes in the '90s doesn't really work for mine when it comes to actually using it every day, so I figured I'd have fun with it while I was changing the colors for the various programs.
Plan 9 is a research operating system developed by Bell Labs as a successor to UNIX.
I would suggest starting somewhere like here to get an idea of what it's about, as well as checking out this video from one of 9front's core contributors.
For those interested in learning more about Plan 9 and trying it out in a public environment: SDF Public Access UNIX System is hosting their seasonal Plan 9 Boot Camp starting June 20th. Feel free to drop into com and say hello!
Oh sure, lots of things are "inconvenient" on Plan 9.
Of note for most would-be users: if you rely on a modern web browser like Firefox/Chrome, forget about it. Never going to happen.
It's important to remember that Plan 9 is fundamentally a research operating system; it's not really a "typical" environment by any stretch, and that stems largely from it being entirely network-based and distributed. A single Plan 9 system in isolation can only be so interesting. Using it on a laptop like this can be an entirely different set of problems.
If you'd like some examples of things you may face:
booting can be slow
can be intimidating to set up for some of the more important features – factotum(4) and secstore(1), new users and directories under /, etc.
cwfs is slow
hjfs is really slow
no multi-monitor support
only recently did we get a filesystem that specifically aims to be crash-safe
poor documentation, though it's been getting better
reading research papers is basically a requirement for understanding the system
security is not a priority
For me, though? I genuinely don't need much more than what's available in the base system.
![[rio] Plan 9 is not UNIX](https://lemmy.sdf.org/pictrs/image/0610f0f2-ec7f-45d9-b458-dc6c00b3ac69.png){kind=link}
