Re: [9fans] Balancing Progress and Accessibility in the Plan 9 Community. (Was: [9fans] Interoperating between 9legacy and 9front)

[adventures in9 <adventuresin9@gmail.com>]

On Sun, May 12, 2024 at 7:17 PM clinton <clintonclinton@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If I were completely naive to actually  running plan9 but with many clues about other operating systems and hardware, would it be better for me to install 9legacy on some mildly obsolescent but still quite serviceable and reliable hardware, or start with 9front on something more modern? Is the learning curve the same for both varieties? Would it help getting to know 9front if I spent a bit of time with her older sister 9legacy? Can 9legacy be considered the gateway drug to 9front?
> I await the scorching flames for my great impudence of interjecting into a vociferous discussion with such a pragmatic tangent!

Having done a variety of Plan9 and 9Front installs on various pieces
of hardware and VMs...

I would, and do, tell most people to just go with 9Front.  It does all
the same core Plan9 concepts.  It all speaks 9P and has per-process
namespaces. A few of the commands have changed, like rimport and rcpu
, instead of import and cpu.  It has a few new things, like auto
mounting usb thumb drives in /shr.  When you work your way up to
managing a grid, there are a lot of changes, but nothing that really
gets away from the core concepts.

I run 9Front on plenty of old hardware.  I boot it on mips based
router boards with only 64MB of ram.  I run it on very new but rather
meager and cheap hardware and have done videos demonstrating it.  I've
ran it on Virtualbox in Windows on a 10 year old laptop, and bhyve on
a FreeBSD file server with pci passthrough to the nic, both cases
running on a single core.

9Front does all the stuff classic Plan9 does as far as teaching one
the basic concepts of Plan9.  It also has the advantage of more
hardware drivers and an active community adding more drivers and
documentation.

I see a lot of arguments about 9Legacy having a more pristine license.
But nothing about it doing anything better than 9Front.  Or any
arguments that 9Front does anything in a very non-Plan9 way.

In my case, 9Legacy was the gateway drug.  I started with Miller's Pi
images on 3 rpi 3B's, so I could run a file server, cpu server, and
terminal.  But the difficulty moving from that to some retired Dell
office computers is why I jumped over to 9Front.  The 9Front usb
install image just works better on a wider variety of old and new
hardware.


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