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this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Asklemmy
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Plan 9
It is an absolutely revolutionary OS by some of the original creators of Unix, that extends its core concepts in more coherent and elegant ways into the world of modern computing, instead of having everything from networking on up be tacked on by people who were perfectly capable but lacked the vision.
Examples:
Instead of NAT, if one machine on your network has the internet and the others don’t, you can say “use that other machine’s network stack now” and boom everything works. Your machine knows what its real external IP address is, it can listen on world-facing ports on the other machine as it needs to, everything works and is simple.
There’s a command for “run the rest of this session’s commands on that other machine’s CPU / memory” and it all just works. The sensation is that your computer just got magically faster.
Etc etc. I actually haven’t played with it extensively, and deployment is so limited that I’m not sure how useful it would even be, but if you are a fan of well made OSs that do things in a genuinely different fashion, it is objectively the best option to play around with. sdf.org has a place you can get an account on their Plan 9 machines and they do little free beginner courses in it over livestream.
At a quick glance on the wiki page, it sounds like something that would work great if we needed hundreds "dumb" terminals that just connected to a central server and received/displayed the output back to the user
That's most of what we do today.
Every web app you use right now - which is most of your day for most users - is just a dumb terminal UI hitting some API on some foreign computer.
Plan 9 uses the file system as a way of interacting with apis. Linux took this idea directly by copying in the
/procfilesystem from 9, which are not bytes on a disk but are instead the kernel presenting its running processes in the format of files and directories in your file namespace, and with which you can interact to control those processes.It also took this idea and created FUSE - file systems in user space - so that you can do the same thing on Linux as a user, but with not quite the same ease you have on plan 9 - and notably, fuse file systems are not naturally network file systems, and so you can't export them as easily to the network as you can with nine machines, where it's implicit.
Last, Linux took the idea of per-process namespaces from 9, setting the stage for all of the docker, snap, etc. tools we use today.
In short, a lot of nine already is mainstream because it's been adopted by Linux. However, using plan 9 and then returning back to Linux feels like putting on bulky gloves, because Linux did not start with these concepts in mind, but bolted them on after.
/Tinyrant