Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52

[Dan Cross <cross@math.psu.edu>]

On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 09:49:58PM +0200, csant wrote:
> Allow me a question: what exactly is it that the long-term Plan 9 users
> miss on Plan 9, to look for it on some other system? An application I
> understand people use regularly via VNC is a browser - is there anything
> else that really is missing? You mention "third party apps": what exactly
> is missing? And mainly: what is the reason for it missing?

It's no one thing that *you* can't live without, but rather that you cut
yourself off from the rest of the world when you run Plan 9 as your only
system.  Yes, the back of a browser can be a real bummer (I tried to live
with Charon as my only browser for a while; that didn't work out too well).
Any number of things may or may not be necessary on a daily basis:

0) A browser.
1) Some office suite application or applications.  Sure, *I* can edit
   my documents in sam or acme and do markup using troff or tex or
   some other such thing, but you ever try emailing a troff document
   to a non-technical colleague?  Or one who comes from a Windows only
   background?  These are the same people who may email me an MS word
   document with embedded graphics, or a PowerPoint presentation, or
   an Excel spreadsheet.  Or a Visio graphic.
   You get the picture; I can control the format of the output I
   produce output, and thus can get away with using Plan 9.  But I
   can't control others, who may send me something I need to see, read,
   watch or listen to, but can't do so under Plan 9.
2) An IM client (I worked at a job where we used AIM for internal company
   communications; actually, two of my jobs used it.  Believe it or not,
   it was highly effective.  Sure, the protocol sucks, but we could "talk"
   to one another on a daily basis).
3) I use Mathematica a lot.  That's critical for me.
4) I hate to say it, but sometimes I need C++, or Objective-C, or any
   number of other languages that I just don't have either compilers or
   interpreters for under Plan 9.
5) Any number of players of various multimedia formats.
6) A mail client that can do GnuPG or OpenPGP or whatever.
7) Any number of other applications....

Some of the traditional solutions are bandaids; VNC is a good example here.
It prevents gangrene, but isn't a real solution by itself; for instance, it
*may* be fast enough to push video over my network (or, rather, my network
may be fast enough for VNC to keep up with real-time video), but what about
sound?  Ugh.  It's like X11 all over again...a partial solution to a sticky
problem at the wrong level.

Other solutions, the so-called, "well, quit bitching and write the code..."
models also break down.  I'm sorry, but Mozilla has 10,000 sets of hands
writing code for firefox; I can't duplicate all that effort.  And from a
usage point of view, they've done a lot and done a reasonable job at it,
too.  I'd rather leverage their work than reinvent the square wheel myself.
So, I come up with some hybrid solution where I have multiple platforms.
For me, it works to have a combination of Plan 9 (even if my servers are
currently down, and have been for a while now...hi Andrey!  Sorry about
that!), Unix, VMS, and the mac.  Others wouldn't like that.  Hey, that's
cool, this is what I like and feel I'm effective in.

Anyway, that's my 2c.

	- Dan C.