[tcmart14]

I think in order to achieve your final point, these kinds of things are necessary. I agree that it would be great to see a project that revives the core concepts of Plan9 in a modern sense, however, you have to attract people and give them a baseline for what that is. You do that by introducing people to Plan9. Talk about its features and how it does things. Stir enough interest then go, "Hey, lets either take the code base and modernize it into a full fledged modern OS" or "Lets start from scratch with the target of where Plan9 would be today if it got decent user adoption back then." That or get a Linux or BSD dev to play with Plan9, finding a feature they really like, then they go, "Hey, I think I can implement that feature over here."

[glangdale]

There's a huge distinction between reviving the spirit of Plan 9 and reviving the ideas. Trying to retroactively revive the direction of an experimental early-90s OS to intercept 2020-era hardware is goofy. Computers are very different now than they were then; surely some of the things invented in the past 30 years might influence OS design?

The thing that still appeals to me about Plan 9 as a concept - is the willingness to do a clean-sheet design and not be bound by the way that everyone else is doing things.

A better design would also not fetishize uselessness. It's one thing to have a cool environment but it's quite another to point-blank refuse to maintain a compatibility layer that allows people to run significant programs that people want to use. Plan 9 didn't have to allow the APE (ANSI POSIX Environment, a project from Howard Trickey) to run down into uselessness.

There are a lot of interesting system design questions that arise from letting people use computers the way they want to, for 2021 workloads. I think we probably know how to let people use shell, ed/vi/emacs/... and cc to make hand-built astronomy databases and manually paint a time of day clock into a window. But you don't get to find out the demands of modern computing without having enough compatibility layers to let someone run a database or a reasonably-complete 3D engine or a web browser on your system.