[smazga]

On a spare pc I would absolutely recommend it. I have it on a raspberry pi and I love it. It's hard to explain, but it takes me back to the days when I was a kid discovering computing for the first time. It's just...fun.

Everything feels so simple and well-designed. Once you sort of wrap you head around the core concepts (namespaces, what 9p really gives you, etc) you suddenly start seeing how crummy posix based systems really are.

You can enable a shocking amount of functionality with little scripts.

At my last job, I worked on a mobile banking app (mostly c++/java) and I developed almost exclusively in acme on my raspberry pi with some little scripts to use my apple laptop for compiling.

Yeah, you'll miss out on some things (mostly web and gaming related) but if you're like me, your real pc will become your spare because you'll look for every excuse you can to do it in plan9 first and only use your expensive rig as a fall back.

[ori_b]

This is roughly how I work too; I develop Go, glue in some Linux for doing builds. The biggest weakness is web browsing, and there's a lot that could be done to glue in the hardware virtualization support better into the system, in the style of WSL, so we can run an instance of Chrome/Linux. (I would like to interject for a moment...). The VMX layer needs performance work, SVM support, and window and system integration out of the box.

(This was posted using netsurf on 9front in a coffee shop)

[zozbot234]

Plan9-derived OS's are at their best when used on multiple systems connected as a network or cluster, not just on a single "spare" box. What the Linux ecosystem calls "containerization" is part of the basic workings of the system, and you can use the "cpu" facility to execute processes remotely (perhaps via a "cloud" service) whilst giving them access to local resources and doing I/O on your local system. It's essentially aiming to create a completely transparent replacement for 'ssh' and its derivatives, including orchestration, containerization etc. frameworks.

[haolez]

Awesome! Do you use 9front?

[smazga]

Yes! The 9front crew is really good at adding stuff to keep the OS useful. Crypto is up-to-date, ssh plays well, ori_b (who also commented here) wrote a plan9 git client that 9front uses. 9front is the best way to go, in my opinion.

It's also what sdf uses too, for what it's worth.

There's a very friendly discord, but most of the old guard is on irc. It's...less friendly there.

[ncmncm]

TIL

http://fqa.9front.org/fqa1.html#1.1