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Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:26:29 +0200
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From: Gorka Guardiola <paurea@gmail.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] Help for home user discovering Plan 9
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On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Balwinder S Dheeman <bdheeman@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Please set aside rare cases and let us know who except for the students,
> teachers and, or researchers uses Plan9 and, or Inferno in the offices,
> homes and, or cafes and for what?
>
> The Plan9 project started in 1980, took around 9 years to be solid
> enough to be usable and that too by the internal and, or lab people
> [http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html] only. Whereas, the FreeBSD
> and, or Linux (though not an OS or Unix variant in a sense) came into
> existence later in 1993 and 1991 respectively are more popular among any
> other variants of Unix.

That is the difference between coming up with a design an rethinking the
system and just copying one and porting software already written. Linux
started mostly using all the gnu stuff and copied all the design from already
existing Unix things. That of course takes less than rethinking
everything carefully
from scratch. For example UTF. Among other things.

That said what is the points of this discussions?. Use whatever you want
and have fun. I use 4 or 5 operating systems
for different things. One of them is Plan 9. Not only for teaching but
as infrastructure
For example this is the CMS for our courses:
http://lsub.org/magic/group?o=i&g=c
And we ran several labs which runs diskless for teaching and so.
This infrastructure serves hundreds of students. I can even have 100 computers
running diskless with students with daily automatic incremental backups (venti)
using the CMS (yes, with abaco) and compiling and running programs
at the same time against one file server. Try that with *any* other
operating system
(and our hardware infrastructure).

Then again, that may not be "solid enough" for you. I happen to work
at a University, sorry.

I also run Mac OS and use it for web browsing. Windows for several
devices (like a USB sniffer) which I don't have drivers nor I do I
feel like writing.
Linux in my illiad ebook.
And inferno/octopus for integrating all this stuff into a usable environment.
And some time even others.

If Plan 9 is not useful for you nor you get how it can be, good, don't use it.

For me it is.
--
- curiosity sKilled the cat