Has anyone here ever tried Plan 9? It was designed by Bell Labs in the late 80s as a research successor to Unix. GUI-driven, heavily networked, everything is a file but even more than Unix went at the time (IIRC, /proc on Linux was extremely inspired by Plan 9). Running programs on different machines was a major feature, you'd have disk servers to store things and CPU servers to run tasks, and your local machine would render the interface and it'd all be seamless, even to the point where if you had programs for a different architecture, if you were connected to a CPU server that had that architecture, the program would run. I really wanted to try all the crazy networking stuff out, but I didn't have more computers to do it back when I tried running the OS for an extended period of time. Maybe I could get something going now, future project. It's not something you can really run as a daily driver (the two things that affected me the most were no video playback and no proper browser, which were way more of an issue when I only had one computer), although the modern 9front distribution has made strides in keeping it working on modern hardware and adding useful software. I like the window manager, Rio quite a bit. It's obnoxiously simple to the point of being extremely opaque to get started with. It's not complicated at all, but like everything else in the system, you need to read the manual to get to grips with it. It demands a 3-button mouse, which makes it a bit awkward at times and nearly impossible to use on most laptops without an external mouse... but it's very logical and clean. Felt like riding a bike firing it up again and after a little wobbliness (in particular, resizing a window is weird, you select the resize command, select the window, and then draw the new size of the window) Writing code for it is... different. I spent a little bit of time learning the system APIs ages ago, but the dev team really was quite dead set on not caring one whit about making it Unix-like (almost to the point of absurdity sometimes, there are several cases where Plan 9 uses the name of a Unix thing in an entirely different context despite it coming out of Bell Labs and worked on by major original Unix people), even if the system is absolutely a cousin to olschool Unix, so I was a little lost, and there isn't as much documentation as I am used to. There is a compiler and system to assist in porting Unix stuff to Plan 9, and I used that quite a bit, but it absolutely felt like cheating. I really like how clean the the shell syntax is, rc is just a really nice shell. It's an absolute breath of fresh air vs Bourne and derivatives. You get to do a LOT just with shell scripting because everything truly is a file, so by just modifying various files on the system, you can do arbitrary system tasks. Move windows, read and change the text in a different window, establish network connections and send data, the system exposes a ton of stuff through the filesystem and it's super cool. I think I remember using something that exposed IRC as part of the filesystem a while ago, but that was back when I had any IRC channels to go to. （;´д｀） The system also features Acme, a really powerful text editor system that wants to be a shell in its own right. It's also kind of opaque, based around a few very simple principles taken very, very far. Every single character in it is editable, down to the menubars. I had a VM with 9front installed on one of my harddrives and I was hoping I'd have set up any of the stuff from my main install a few years ago, but it's pretty bare. Pic related, I'd downloaded shareware Doom and configured it last time I booted the VM, which was apparently in 2022.
>>25 i have not used it and some one was trying to get me to use it one time, i heard things where to much like a file, like mouse movement and positioning? its like dragonfly bsd but on crack right?
computing like that is always been my dream, i know so many ppl say on tech youtube that you just cant split up things like that and more cores dose not = better performance. that having a cluster super computer cant make graphics and gaming better. it just seems dumb, if we can have 1gbs network speeds and can already program multiple cores then clustering should be a possibility, maybe i am talking out my ass and don't know low level all that well
>>27 So, as a product of the late-80s/early-90s, Plan 9's design is more thin-client style. You'd have some beefy servers or whatever in the back, and cheap workstations would be scattered around to connect and run tasks. Due to the fact that the system tries to ensure that everything you have access to is in the filesystem across machines, this means you can connect to whatever CPU server you want on the network and your whole environment just works. You could reasonably do a lot of over-the-network processing between multiple machines, but it wouldn't be quite as seamless as just adding more machines to the pool and they get handled in an completely transparent SMP sort of fashion. That would be super cool, but I really don't know how feasible such a system is across the network, even between machines right next to each other, let alone across an office or across the Internet. Each CPU server runs its own processes and doesn't share memory space. They can (and generally do) share a filesystem namespace, and it would be more than reasonable for each to send data via that so you could handle IPC/workload distribution. Since EVERYTHING is a file, regardless of whether it hits the disk (and often, it doesn't -- network connections are made by manipulating the filesystem), this is extremely easy. To do distributed computing on Plan 9, you'd have a program on your terminal that checks for other CPU servers mapped on the network and asks them to start their copy of the program, then it transfers work to those copies, which would report back. Plan 9's design makes this significantly easier to write vs other platforms, but you'd still need to write it yourself as far as I'd know. Also sadly, I was wrong about seamless program execution between architectures -- apparently, Plan 9 actually makes it so that binaries in their respective architecture's bin folder are mapped into /bin based on which machine is running them. Still cool, and it works in a really seamless fashion since the CPU server running the program gets to see the filesystem from your machine's perspective (for the most part), but not as cool as automatically running it on another machine if this one couldn't.
You can get by with 9front if most of what you do on a daily basis is textual manipulation. The only thing I can think of that's cooler than Plan 9 is Lisp machines, but you can't use those in the modern day.
