Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

[Tyga <cyberfonic@gmail.com>]

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I fear that I might be starting a flame war, but ...

I have been using Plan9 (and Inferno to a lesser extent) on and off for
about two decades.  The concepts are very enticing.  But like any other
niche OS (e.g. Minix) the biggest stumbling block seems to be device
drivers.  And display adaptors are one of the most challenging for device
drivers which in turn means that anything that depends on X, etc is going
to be a challenge.  Sound cards, etc are almost as bad.

For these reasons Plan9 struggles to become more widely adopted as a
desktop system and in turn porting programs is either taken on as a
challenge or labour of love.  So it is not surprising that the utilities
that you mention are lagging behind the ports to more widely used platforms.

To answer your question, there are a some people who use Plan9 seriously,
but I doubt that their numbers will ever become much larger. Personally, I
would like to use Plan9 for servers, but due to the development toolchain
issues I keep going back to Linux variants.

Wishing you continued with your adventure series.


On 11 June 2018 at 16:14, 刘宇宝 <liuyubao@yingmi.cn> wrote:

> Yesterday night I finished the sixth article of my Plan 9 adventure series
> at Zhihu, a Chinese Quora like site, https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/c_
> 185117725
>
> I feel many things are interesting and special, such as Rio(simple and
> beautiful, love it), Acme(so easy to extend), 9p(simple and clean),
> rc(right shell), but I'm still not very used to heavy use of mouse.
>
> I find a bunch of game emulators, instruction simulators, fs servers,
> incomplete POSIX environment, all seem very old, this makes me wondering
> whether anybody still seriously uses(or used?) Plan 9 for serious work,
> what software they frequently use, what software is most lack of.
>
> For my daily work and hobby, I use macOS for Desktop and Linux for
> Server,  most frequently used softwares include:
>
> * iTerm2+Vim+Spacemacs:         I can use Acme + rc instead.
> * SSH:          Plan9 has an old SSH client.
> * Perl, Python, NodeJS: Probably I can't get latest versions and enough
> support for their C extensions, it's basically fine, I can edit it with
> Acme and run on Linux.
> * VirtualBox:   I haven't played vmx.
> * Firefox:              I heard there is an old version running on X.
> Abaco and Mothra are not enough to render correctly most (crappy) web pages.
> * Apple Mail:   haven't played upasfs, I guess this is enough.
> * Wechat:       certainly not exist on Plan 9, it's fine,  it doesn't
> exist on Linux too.
> * Video Player:  don't know any on Plan 9.
>
> So far, seems the most lacking software for me is a good enough Web
> browser.
>
> Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't care whether Plan 9 will win the market,
> I'm just curious whether Plan 9 can still be used seriously.
>
> Thanks,
> Yubao Liu
>
>
>
>

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