[CyberFonic]

I have tinkered with Plan 9 on several occasions. I keep coming back to it because I appreciate its technical and architectural elegance. It is somewhat like yet another example of the VHS vs Betamax situation.

Some things that stop me from using it more widely are:

The GUI: I just can't relate to the aesthetics nor the heavy dependence on the mouse. Granted that I have used it from the shell, but then I also miss out on some niceties and conveniences.

The security mechanism: I understand the intent of the security mechanisms, but have have difficulty in understanding it sufficiently to configure a cluster of Plan 9 systems using some old HP ePCs.

Device drivers: This is a common problem with most non-mainstream OSes. There are too many incompatible devices out there and thus device drivers are either written for some limited common denominator, e.g. VGA and its variants, or simply for what the developers had on hand. We only need to look at the Linux kernel to see that a substantial part of its development is devoted to supporting the widest variety of devices.

I think that the Plan 9 experiment could be re-positioned as an IoT OS. That is an area that I am very interested in.

BTW: check out Russ Cox's implementation of Plan 9 using the vx32 sandboxing on Linux and OS X (https://swtch.com/9vx).