| The Plan 9 UI is deeply arcane. It's heavily inspired by the Oberon UI, which itself is equally arcane, if not even more so. I have a play with Inferno in a VM some years ago. (I can't even find an ISO of it now, which is something that needs fixing badly, alongside a ready-to-run version for Linux on x86-64.) Oberon, and thus Plan 9, spring directly from the era of the original Xerox PARC Alto. Their design comes from before Apple standardised the GUI in the early 1980s, with standardised menu bars, standard window controls in the title bar, the idea of dialog boxes, plus ones that have standard buttons in standard places. (You know -- all the sort of stuff GNOME is busily removing again now.) Microsoft mimicked this design in Windows 1 and 2, DR aped it in GEM, IBM in OS/2 1.x, etc. All later GUIs are informed by LisaOS and MacOS 1. Oberon was before that and it has none of that stuff. Plan 9 loosely mimics Oberon and so it doesn't, either. Result: it's very weird if all you know are post-1990s GUIs. Inferno modernised the Plan 9 UI and it's quite usable by comparison. But Inferno is even more obscure than Plan 9. FWIW, The A2 OS modernised Oberon and it's much more usable, too. Both are still weird but they're vaguely recognisable and you can just start clicking on stuff. |