From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: cbbrowne@hex.net Message-ID: References: <100O5.83751$hk2.227630@news6-win.server.ntlworld.com> Subject: [9fans] Re: someone thinking about trying plan 9 Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 15:09:15 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 2404e4c6-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 "david.bates2" writes: > I was reading about plan 9 recently. To be frank, I'd never head of it until > a week or two ago... I suppose I was just writing to ask whether it was > worth installing at this point in time. I don't doubt that it has some > powerful ideas, but does it have any decent apps that run on it at the > moment? An example would be apps for spreadsheets, databases, and text > editing.... and of course compilers for various langauges. Also, I am a > little unclear on the role of rio. Is it the window manager? Is it an > essential part of the system or can it be replaced as with a linux window > manager? You're missing a rather _crucial_ point; there is no such thing as a "Linux window manager." There are all sorts of window managers that run on "reasonably Unix-like systems, in conjunction with the X Window System," and since the Linux kernel combined with GLIBC and GNU binary and file utilities provides a "reasonably Unix-like system," the WMs cope adequately. The _proper_ tie is to describe them as "X window managers." Plan 9 provides a bunch of parts that are "reasonably Unix-like," which would make it not unreasonable to hope that a window manager might be able to compile and search for resources on Plan 9. However, one of the resources typically required happens to be an operational instance of the X Window System, which _doesn't_ happen to have been ported to run on Plan 9. "No X" has the result of "no applications that require X." Which leads to: - No X window managers - No Motif-based applications like Netscrape - No GTK-based applications like ApplixWare or the GNOME applications - No Qt-based apps like the KDE apps -- (concatenate 'string "cbbrowne" "@hex.net") "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." - Oscar Wilde