Plan9 mentioned by id (again)

Plan9 mentioned by id (again)

[Stephen]

In John Carmack's .plan (for March 18), the following snippet can be found.


Plan9
I spent a few months running Plan9.  It has an achingly elegent internal structure, but a user interface that has been asleep for the past decade.  I had an older version of quake dedicated server running on it (don't ask me for it -- I lost it somewhere) and I was writing a civilized window manager for it in my spare time, but my spare time turned out to be only a couple hours a month, and it just got prioritized out of existance.


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Plan9 mentioned by id (again)

[David]

> Plan9
> I spent a few months running Plan9.  It has an achingly elegent internal
> structure, but a user interface that has been asleep for the past decade.  I
> had an older version of quake dedicated server running on it (don't ask me
> for it -- I lost it somewhere) and I was writing a civilized window manager
> for it in my spare time, but my spare time turned out to be only a couple
> hours a month, and it just got prioritized out of existance.

`Old Fashioned' Window Manager
- small executable
- synchronous, predictable behaviour
- user interface based on simple, consistent design rules
- responsive to user
- works `out of the box'

`Modern' Window Manager
- huge executable
- asynchronous, unpredictable behaviour
- user interface based on whims of marketing division
- machine thrashes every time user moves mouse
- billions of configuration options that need to be set before
   it is even remotely usable

There's no accounting for taste ;-)

P.S.  Curiously, this is just as true if we replace `Window Manager'
with `Web Browser'...