Re: [9fans] So, why Plan 9?

[Max E <maxxedout@comcast.net>]

For any use-case I personally care about (and probably any
workstation/server use case you care about as well,) the Linux kernel
with the GNU userspace will blow anything out of the water, both in
performance and usability. If you don't recognize this you're sticking
your head in the sand. I know P9 is faster in many ways, but have you
tried comparing performance figures with, say, browser rendering times,
Doom 3, or some video transcoder? Exactly.

However, projects like Linux and P9 can and *should* coexist, because
they complement each other. The developers of research OSs get a lot
more freedom to do research advance the state of the art. In fact, I'd
say P9 has contributed at least as much to the state of open-source OS
development as Linux has. Certainly, the Linux kernel uses a lot of
techniques that could only have been incubated within a research OS.
(/proc... what a wacky idea! But a good one.)

So, there are two reasons to use (and port your software to) Plan 9.
-First of all, you get a preview of what Unix development is probably
going to look like in a few years-- increased depreciation of ASCII for
Unicode, resource shared between computers, and so on.
-Second of all, Plan 9 is just SO DAMN FUN to play with.

-Max
On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 09:05 +0000, Mark Carter wrote:
> I was reading the suckless.org website the other day, and they seemed
> quite keen on Plan 9. I am running Linux. Is there a useful summary
> document that explains where plan9port fits in with Glendix, and why
> anyone should care about Plan 9 anyway (hope that doesn't come across
> as rude)?
>