[madawan]

I love reading these little blurbs about Plan9. I haven't played around with it too much but it feels very "modern" (I know it's old).

What are some of the ways a beginner can get into Plan9? Can I use it as a Desktop Operating System on my old Thinkpad? What can I do with it? Does it run a modern browser? Could it run QEMU?

[dmytrish]

I tried to run an original Plan 9 image, it is quite outdated (Ethernet configuration in QEMU silently fails, for example; half of its internet resources are either vanished or temporarily unavailable). Maybe, it's just not for beginners.

I've had much more luck with 9front distribution, it seems maintained at least.

A desktop OS is a vague term, but you have to be super undemanding to use Plan 9 in the modern environment. If you plan to develop on it, be aware: it's quite possible, but it is not POSIX-compatible, it has its own, often quite opinionated tools (Acme editor with its obsessive three-button mouse usage is something I could not get used to), it is often a world-in-itself. It has C, Go, Mercurial, Python though. Don't expect many opensource projects we take for granted to be available (databases, servers, etc). However, 9front has its own "repository" [0] that has ssh, vim, ghc and other basic Unix tools.

No, neither Plan 9 nor 9front run a modern internet browser. A modern browser is a complex, non-portable, monolithic, demanding beast. It just does not fit the Plan 9 vision, so the common piece of advice is to run a VNC session to a mainstream OS to browse the internet. `elinks` is "a graphical browser" according to Plan 9 people (and I rather agree).

This is impression of a beginner, so feel free to correct me.

[0] http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Contrib_Index (oops, it is offline at the moment).

[iheartmemcache]

"Opinionated" yes, but entirely consistent with the UNIX mentality. One tool, to do one thing, done well, chained together.

I love emacs so, so much (I'm the nerd who has foot pedals, and I've spent at least 1k hours perfecting my .emacs.d over the last 10 years). It's ability to meta-modify itself is incredible.

Editor rant for nerds who have spent at least 100 hours on .vimrc or emacs.d:

But ACME takes it to the next level. It feels like Smalltalk. It exposes all buffers via a FUSE block device you can mount, and all of a sudden you can feed buffers or sub-selections of buffers to standard UNIX utils. Literally everything that takes input from STDIN you can pipe to, and optionally return to the same buffer via STDOUT. You're no tied to languages. Hating Vimscript or Elisp becomes irrelevant because as long as you can run the binary and pipe to/from it, you can manipulate your data.

It's fantastic for exploratory scripting, literate programming and my only qualm with it is I'm a home-rower. (That is, all of my interfacing revolves around keeping my wrists and about 1/4" of my lower palm. My wrists are planted in that specific position 98% of the time, with movement primarily centered around pivoting my wrists about those two radial points).

My idea is to use Caps as a meta-key, then have s,d,f act as 1,2,3 on the mouse. Even with chording, it doesn't impose a stretch.

If you are passionate about editors, watch Russ Cox's talk on ACME. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M.

[mycroftiv]

You can try Plan 9 in a VM or use some of the software via plan9port. Old Thinkpads often run Plan 9 well, especially the 9front version. What can you do with it? Server stuff, software development, os research, hobbyism. No modern browser or multimedia support, or office suites. Runs well inside QEMU, does not run QEMU.

[cinap]

well, theres /bin/audio/* in 9front and sb16, ac97, intel hd audio and various usb soundcards are supported. listening to music on my thinkpad all the time. it also works fine on "newer" thinkpads as well like x230. everything is supported, including wifi, native graphics, sound, gigabit ethernet, sata and even the build in sdmmc controller. and yes, 64 bit kernel, 16gb ram works.

[jpm9]

Running 9front natively on Thinkpad X230 as well as virtually on Qemu/KVM (9front supports both disk and net virtio). If you configure it as CPU server you can connect to it remotely using drawterm from Linux/*BSD/Windows for example and share files between systems. You can browse web pages unless they're maimed with js or css. Videos you can't view (yet) unless they're gif animations ;-)