Re: [9fans] How useable is Plan9?

[anothy@cosym.net]

there's a bunch of people who use Plan 9 regularly, in a
variation of mixed environments to exclusive use. it's
quite usable, if you kwow what you're getting into. it
doesn't do _everything_, and some things have a very
different feel to them. but the short answer to your
question is "yes", and lots of people use it that way.

the remainder is specific testimonial as to my setup.

i use plan 9 every day as my primary work environment. i
use troff to write things, and `page' to view postscript,
pdf, gif, etc. i use Acme mail as my mail reader, for
multiple mailboxes. i use Charon (part of the Inferno
distribution) as a web browser, and it works on ~%95 of
the sites i want to get to. plan 9 has some image
manipulation tools, although certainly nothing like the
Gimp or Photoshop. it had more in the 2nd edtion, but
they've been lost to the new graphics model.

as mentioned above, however, plan 9 does not do it all.
there's no nntp reader, as far as i know (although there
was for the 2nd edition), and there are a few sites
(like my bank) that Charon won't work on (usually
because they insist i'm running an "outdated" version of
my browser and i need to upgrade, despite the fact that
Charon'll do everything they need). for these two things
i use VNC (which is impressivly fast over slow networks)
to connect to a Solaris box running Netscape.

the biggest thing for a new user trying to use Plan 9
regularly is to not expect it to be Unix/Linux. there is
(thankfully, i think) no KDE or GNOME, nor X at all. the
host of GNU tools is not there, and the development
environment is probably different than what you're used
to. the shell is rc, not bash/ksh/tcsh. more generally,
the entire feel of the system is different - more focus
on "clean and elegant" than "neat and cool".
-α.