from Hacker News

Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system

by moody__ on 7/27/24, 11:52 PM with 85 comments

  • by jazzyjackson on 7/28/24, 4:32 AM

    For the uninitiated, Plan 9 lives on as the filesystem network interface that allows Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux cross-platform access to your C drive. Via "https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2019/06/01/wsl-access-to-li...":

        Plan 9’s filesystem is a very simple network filesystem protocol to share files between systems. They are specifically using 9P2000.L.
    They considered using Samba and SMB instead but can’t rely on Samba being installed and usable in the Linux guest OS and didn’t want to ship it because Samba is GPL licensed.
    They picked Plan 9 because it’s much simpler to implement. Also Microsoft already had Plan 9 server code for some other Linux container project they’d done.
    The \\wsl$\ path is handled in the Windows system by the MUP, an existing hook for network-like filesystems. They added a new one for Plan 9.
    The $ is in the name so that it can’t be confused with a computer whose hostname is wsl.
    The Plan 9 server in Linux communicates with the Windows Plan 9 client via a Unix socket. (Windows supports Unix sockets; who knew?)
    Windows can access your Linux files even if no Linux is instance is running. There’s a new Windows service called LXSManagerUser that mediates user identity and permissions.

  • by rcarmo on 7/28/24, 8:06 AM

    Plan9 is one of those things I go back to every Summer and that is somewhere between completely mind-blowing (check out the GIF at https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/09/02/1900 to see how fast it boots in real-time on a single-core Pi) and almost completely unfit for purpose because it just doesn’t integrate well (or easily enough) with modern systems (I also considered using it for a writing “appliance” - https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/09/22/1230 - but syncing data off it was a blocker, and three-button mouse chording GUIs are just not a thing I want to deal with).

    One of the “stupid” ideas I have in my back-burner is to rewrite rio so that it works like Mac OS 7 (the platinum look with window shading), which in my mind was always a very sane and efficient way to manage windows — but time is not on my side…

    I have one of my usual lists of resources for it on https://taoofmac.com/space/os/plan9 - comment here if it’s missing anything you particularly like.

  • by kccqzy on 7/28/24, 1:57 AM

    > The Plan 9 implementations tend to not be as feature rich as the proper upstream variants.

    This is IMO the biggest drawback. Why wouldn't any user want the software to be feature rich? In fact, looking at Plan 9, I often feel that the provided software is just a MVP.

  • by readmemyrights on 7/28/24, 12:01 PM

    I closely studied plan 9 many times, I unfortunately can't use it because of accessibility issues but from what I read and heard it feels more like a time capsule from the 90s, which is ironic considering it was meant to be a future path for os research. And even in the 90s there were developments in unix that the labs seemingly completely ignored, like DJB's daemon supervision.

    To talk about the article itself, the only reason plan 9 can achieve such a design is because it's developed and used by the same small group of people. If linux is a bazaar and BSDs are cathedrals, then 9front is a monastery's citadel. Another thing that isn't mentioned is that both linux and BSD (and pretty much anything based on posix) has a lot of third party software that would be hard to maintain along with the rest of the system, if the monks even include it to begin with. And that software could include something like jq which a lot of software depends on and would love to just assume it's there.

    And really, what more does someone get from something like this over, say, having a more or less formal standard on what a true plan9 system includes and waving it in someone's face when they choose to ignore it? This is pretty much what modern unices do and it works out great in cases when it's actually important. Most people don't care what commit your system is built from as long as it works as their programs expect it to.

  • by GianFabien on 7/28/24, 12:58 AM

    I've played with Plan9 several times, but never used it seriously. The aesthetics that puts me off. Would have been great if they had taken guidance from BeOS / Haiku-OS for the look and feel. Heck, even Windows 95 would have been an improvement.

  • by tylerchilds on 7/28/24, 1:02 AM

  • by zokier on 7/28/24, 6:26 AM

    The author is putting "upstream" on some weird pedestal. The whole point of foss is that any upstreams have very limited privileges compared to downstreams.

    > Put in another way, if someone wanted the ability to touch every line of code (in the upstream sense), they would have to be a member of some non trivial amount of communities.

    On a typical distro you can just download sources and start hacking, you don't need to be member of any community.

    While something like Debian might not be monorepo in the strictest sense, on a conceptual level it is very close. They still have all the sources under their control and are not dependent on anything outside. They are at full liberty to accept or reject any patches regardless of where they come from, from "upstream" or "downstream".

    This idea that distros are actually independent full-featured operating systems is an idea that I think is getting forgotten way too often. Distros are (or rather can be) much more than mere repackaging of upstream software.

  • by tbrownaw on 7/28/24, 3:45 AM

    So is there something (social or technical) that makes it tricky to independently provide apps for plan 9, or is it just that the only people who care already have commit access?

  • by teleforce on 7/28/24, 9:48 AM

    Fun facts, the unpopularity of Plan 9 compared to Unix/Linux is what motivated Rob Pike writing the now infamous article Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]:

    [1] Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [PDF]:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709807

  • by lagniappe on 7/28/24, 2:30 AM

    The year of the 9 desktop cometh!

  • by pjmlp on 7/28/24, 6:00 AM

    Superceded by Inferno as follow up project, where Limbo took the role of the abandoned Alef language for Plan 9.

    I always have the impression the discussion stops on a gas station the middle of the road, instead of on the destination.

  • by nopoolontheroof on 7/28/24, 12:21 PM

    I have a strong interest in different OS designs, and Plan 9 is one of the more interesting one. Having said that, it's only place is in a VM - it's not really cut out for everyday use. Pretty sure the people using it as such are doing so just to be 'different' - like BeOS back in the day.

  • by revskill on 7/28/24, 9:05 AM

  • by pxmpxm on 7/28/24, 2:20 AM

    Plan9 is the ycN equivalent of https://xkcd.com/739/