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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'm just pointing out the shortcomings I found. I've been using it and keeping tabs on resources for Plan 9 and Inferno since 2014:

- https://taoofmac.com/space/os/plan9

...so I do know a lot about it in practice. It's just that, also in practice, nearly ten years of tinkering with it have been mesmerising, mostly fun, but not useful enough for my particular use cases. YMMV.

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 tinker with, it is very hard to get going.

You can install it on a virtual machine and start playing.

Try 9Front, they have two browsers ;)

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 settings. Sort of like sysfs on linux but more on steroids.

Plan9 was also far ahead with sandboxing by having namespaces, which means you can expose restricted views of the "filesystem" to each process. Since in plan9 there's no ioctls and every resource access is simply read/write syscall (even networking!), restricting the "filesystem" is all you need to restrict what a process can do on your 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

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.

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.

> 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.

I've only been trying Plan 9 (via 9front) the past few days, just in a VM, but I agree about the mouse. My mouse hand cramps up very easily, and I've become so accustomed to keyboard driven interfaces (I use dwm as my window manager, for example) it almost feels weird using a mouse so much.

Definitely a very interesting system though.

Some people in the community are playing around with a rio replacement.

https://shithub.us/sigrid/riow/HEAD/info.html

This has some keyboard shortcuts etc.

+1 on the browser issue. So much of basic development these days requires a browser (I'm even using one to read this Plan 9 Desktop Guide) that not having one hosted by the OS moves the OS from "Desktop development" to "Embedded system development" for all practical purposes for me.

Browsrs? Just get this and read it with page.

https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/9.intro.pdf

Sorry, I never received this suggestion on Plan9 because I can't read Hacker News without a browser... ;)

(... and so on and so on. HTTP, as a protocol, has eaten the world. A "desktop" anything without a native browser in it really sticks out.)

Turns out that you can browse hacker news (and a lot of the internet) fairly well from both netsurf and mothra.

[Posted from 9front.]

A PSP, Lynx or Opera Mini 4 user agent may do wonders.

webfs(4) supports custom ones.

>HTML, as a protocol

Ahem.

Thank you; corrected. :)

> The reliance on a three button mouse, which makes it impossible to use Plan 9 on a modern laptop without finagling with modifier keys (no, I don't want to go back to using a mouse, thanks).

Thinkpad ;)