From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2006 22:50:30 -0400 From: Dan Cross To: csant , Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: 9fans Digest, Vol 27, Issue 52 Message-ID: <20060725025030.GE6226@augusta.math.psu.edu> References: <20060724160009.A640A5AF70@mail.cse.psu.edu> <53f976bd0607240938i79313aa5nf6e33e176868a2bb@mail.gmail.com> <44C51F7A.4050604@lanl.gov> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8be80af2-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 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.