Re: [9fans] Is the vanilla Plan 9 still alive?

[sl@9front.org]

most of these answers don't really answer the question everyone knows
op is asking.  why do we always play these games?

the answer is: no, vanilla plan 9 is not still alive.

background:

plan 9's creators all left bell labs many years ago, and none of them
use plan 9 anymore[0].  bell labs itself has changed hands a couple of
times since development of plan 9 came to its ignoble end.  yes, some
third parties occasionally tinker.  richard miller puts out code that
can be run on raspberry pi hardware.  some other former heavy users
occasionally push piecemeal bits of personal projects into the public
eye.  nobody takes any of it seriously because none of them really use
plan 9 to do anything people use computers to do[1].  which is not to
say their efforts aren't appreciated.  thanks, guys.

for some reason, when interested newbs show up on this mailing list
asking this same question, which happens from time to time, they're
always made to believe there exists a thriving community of devoted
plan 9 from bell labs users eager to point them towards resources
useful for running plan 9 on a computer manufactured after sbc
rebranded itself as at&t.

9front was created in 2011 because by then it had already been
apparent for several years that this was a baldfaced lie.

failing a massive leak of all the code 9fans will swear to you they
are running on their modern computers, your choices include:

- 9front (new drivers, modern cryptography, useful new programs)
- 9legacy (an attempt to combine patches from all extant personally
	maintained copies of the plan 9 source tree)

don't thank me until you've tried to get straight answers to follow-up
questions.

sl

[0] http://fqa.9front.org/fqa0.html#0.2.3

[1] i'm typing this on a thinkpad x250, over intel wifi/wpa2, running
1920x1080 on the native lcd.  it's running plan 9, but is sure ain't
vanilla[2].

[2] oh yeah, all the code is available here:
http://code.9front.org/hg/plan9front