How I Switched to Plan 9
To me this is part of a need to integrate my digital life. I understand the swimming against the tide here (recovering FreeBSD laptop user) - because an integrated life is a controllable life
I want tools before I want services
I want an agent that has access to my digital life where ever that is. I want that agent to be the expression of my tools - that is my first and possibly only service
I want my mobile device to keep and give me access to my digital footprint - my phone calls, text, gps locations.
I want a message in Whatsapp and in facebook and in email to just be a message. if that breaks someone's business model I do t care.
I want to be able to review my digital actions - what was the name of the video I stupidly watched at 1am last night - let me review that each week so I can improve my behaviour - not have my behaviour controlled
I want this for each member of my family too
Plan 9 as a whole is a pretty good IDE for general development - excels at C, shell scripts, Go, and similar. Having been created explicitly to OS differs from older (POSIX/VMS era) OSes by making GUI, architecture portability, namespaces, user-level filesystems, software services, network transparency and distributed computing first-order concerns.
For those unable to switch outright, I wholeheartedly recommend plan9port[0] - an almost complete set of utilities and protocols from Plan 9, ported to run in Linux, MacOS X, and OpenBSD userspace. It's being actively developed[1] by the 9fans community.
plan9port comes with both sam and acme[2] programmers' text editors.
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[0] https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/
I played around with it for a year or so (had three consecutive Raspberry Pis running it as a VNC/SSH console and general tinkering machine), and quite enjoyed it, except for two things that turned out to be the ultimate dealbreakers:
* no truly useful self-hosted browser (when you can’t even log on to your home router to troubleshoot things, an always-on console is useless)
* mouse chording (I understand the history of it, but it was a constant pain)
I would have loved to (for instance) hack my Chromebook into running Plan 9 natively, but being fundamentally unable to use it without an external mouse made it impossible. And no, key combos are not the answer here.
Another thing I played around with was running Inferno on the Pi (I have a bunch of resources for both listed on https://taoofmac.com/space/os/Plan9), and that was a lot of fun (for the low-level stuff).
Now for the controversial bit:
Porting a full browser to Plan9 is not likely to ever happen, but I do wish the community would make an attempt at modernizing it ever so slightly rather than assuming it’s perfect (I’m on the 9fans mailing-list, and it is a fascinating cross-sample of hard-boiled traditionalists and almost ascetic pragmatists)
I have an odd fascination with people who manage to use Plan 9 (they strike me as delightfully insane). It feels like I'm going down a Discordian reality tunnel whenever I read things like this.
The sam editor is interesting. I use iterm and tmux over mosh, has anyone figured out a simple text editor that supports cursor based cut and paste? I really just want a notepad-like editor, for the rare cases I’m not using Sublime/Atom/VSCode for a remote. Come to think of it, I also want cursor based cut and paste on the command line, and don’t understand why that’s not the default in 2019, and we’re all pretending that we have a physical tele-typewriter.
> With the exception of multimedia and the modern web, all my needs are met.
Bit of a deal-breaker for me, personally.
While we are at it - is there anything like plan 9’a factotum for Linux or OpenBSD? I’ve been reading about plan9’s security model over the last week, and I like it, but can’t find a modern isable port to an os I use.
Oauth/oauth2 are sort of a web equivalent but not really, first because they are web, and 2nd because they aren’t useful for things like pop3 in the same way that factotum is.
(And it would be really great if factotum would list permissions for apps that would support that thing, but... you can’t win them all)
>9front ships with two web browsers, both written as jokes and abandoned by their authors in prior decades. Neither of them support Javascript, CSS, or anything beyond a meager subset of HTML.
The dealbreaker for the vast majority of users still remains then. If I recall correctly though when I tested it some time ago there was a software making possible to run Linux binaries and it could be used to run Opera. Isn't this possible anymore?
I run Plan 9 in a VM now and then which means I've never gotten that far into it. It seems very much like a solution to a problem that I've never had and as such doesn't do much for me. The article's author is a writer by trade and uses his laptop like a typewriter. Plan 9 certainly does that well and it's free of the many distractions that come with other OSs, so good for him.
> Is there support for playing video? No.
That could change in the near future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTU7iLuv6g4&feature=youtu.be
Blows my mind how so much really is text manipulation. Not every thing though!
The reliance on a three button button mouse (buttons which sometimes need to be chorded) makes plan9 impossible to use on any modern Laptop. Many other aspects of the UI are completely idiotic (like pixel perfect mouse selection of words to execute commands). Which is a real shame because everything besides the UI is really great. But it seems like the elitist community is perfectly happy with the fact that nobody uses their software.
Server is giving the following error:
> Error code: MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_SELF_SIGNED_CERT
It's available via this HTTPS mirror if needed: https://archive.is/bVfPc
This is stupid
That this is the top story on HN currently is one of those things that makes me think I should just stop looking at HN. Look, if you want to use Plan 9, go nuts. Follow your bliss. I guess. But the slice of humanity that finds this to be an appealing option is such a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total. How is this relevant to any vaguely reasonable person's life? Why would anyone upvote this Quixotic nonsense? Plan 9 may the be operating system analog of pumpkin pie, but what could it possibly matter given that it has zero ecosystem and zero uptake? Jeezum frigging crow. Give it up. It's dead.
Although I guess one nice thing is that is puts in perspective the fact that stories about tiled window managers and/or Arch Linux and/or God knows what else are always showing up on HN. Kind of like when you see someone, who you can never understand what the hell they're jabbering about, give a talk about something you already know, and you realize that there's no way in hell you would have understood the topic based on what just came out of their mouth. Which is clarifying, because it reveals that they just suck at explaining things, and it's not just that you yourself are a dumbass.
”Is there support for playing video? No.
(...)
Watch this introductory video: https://youtu.be/6m3GuoaxRNM"
I think I'll pass.
> Even one accessed over SSH from an inferior operating system
...and I stopped reading right there. Different doesn't mean worse.
I don't have to use plan9 to value what the 9fans did.
I don't have to use plan9 to secure the benefit of exploring models of software, systems, networks which plan9 explored.
I think that you have to swim very strongly across some currents, to decide to "be" in plan9, but its no different in that sense to choosing to live behind a Nokia brick phone, or only using pen and paper in meetings. Others may work effectively in their kanban on a laptop, but the decision to stop using the parts of your brain which type, and instead use the parts of your brain which shape semantic intent, by writing, is quite large.
And in that sense, deciding to use plan9, or even just a tiling window manager, or to disable image load in web by default, or to use Markdown or Org mode to do thing instead of reaching for some packaged electron app, or to focus on GO or Haskell or whatever the thing is, which forces you to think about what you are doing in code, That decision may be swimming against the stream, but its big.
Plan9 is big. Its not for everyone, and I decided not to invest because it had moving parts I didn't feel confident I understood and at the time I looked at it, was wedded to multiple independent instances of boxes I didn't own.
Now, it is probably entirely possible inside containers or VMs or something, but I am content to know I could.
(I am however, using pen and paper more in meetings)