[throwawaylinux]

Plan 9 fell to second system syndrome. This will hurt Plan 9 enthusiasts and probably get me flamed but it's my opinion.

Not necessarily bloated or inelegant, but over engineered and over confident and missing reasons the first system was successful.

Purifying and perfecting some of the concepts from unix is nice, but someone running a file server or CAD program or editing source code or compiling code or running shell scripts and piping a lot of commands together to do cool things with data just does not see a whole lot of incremental benefit beyond what unix gave them.

Unix was successful because it was there and accessible and pretty easy and pretty good and evolved quickly (if not always elegantly) to new meet new requirements.

For example: purists talk about sockets as some kind of catastrophe. But in all honesty they're not that bad and once you have a few networking tools you can use in shell pipelines you really don't have to have absolute everything as a file. Simple standard composable tools is more important for practical use than everything is a file.

[stormbrew]

Oh I don't disagree with this at all. The main reason I wouldn't ever actually use plan9 day to day on a desktop, which is to some extent the primary use it was designed for (well, thin clients workstations really), is that the whole windowing system is just too alien.

I think most of the missteps in plan9 are above the "everything is a file" layer though. And while sockets aren't that bad, I do think I would still rather interact with them in the plan9 way than the unix way if I could.