When I tried to run Plan 9 in a VM I gave up because I couldn't figure out how to open a shell in the window manager and type ls. I also couldn't figure out how to use the text editor (why can't editors be simple enough so you can just type?) If Plan 9 booted in text/terminal mode I'd use it.
Does anyone know if you can boot Plan 9 in text mode?
However well-designed the OS is internally, it also needs to be approachable externally.
You points seem pretty obvious. In order to get people to switch, at least some basic functionality people use everyday should be the same.
Without similar basic functionality, people will use it briefly, get frustrated, and then never use your OS again. They're also going to tell all their friends and your new OS is dumpster bound before it even gets out of beta.
It was not obvious to Rob Pike (who if not the "leader" of Plan 9 was at least the developer with the highest status).
Pike seemed to lack an understanding of how to entice users whose motivations and interests are different from his own to go through the trouble of actually learning and acclimating to his software. A general lack of marketing savvy, perhaps.
Here is another example of that:
In an post to the plan 9 mailing list (9fans) written in the 1990s, Pike seemed genuinely confused as to why some browser maker (Opera maybe?) did not respond positively to Pike's invitation to port their browser to Plan 9.
This was at a time when on a really good day Plan 9 had fewer than 200 users (most of whom were researchers at Bell Labs and maybe coworkers of those researchers). "I never even received the courtesy of a reply," is how Pike ended the post.
I did not mean to focus so long on one personality. The important point is that there's a lot of things one has to pay attention to if one expects a particular piece of software to gain widespread adoption. In particular, it is not enough to show that you are a very impressive person surrounded by other impressive people with some very innovative idea.
You're leaving out many posts from earlier times where Pike explicitly tells people they're probably never going to get access to Plan 9. It was a research operating system, and even the name was selected to make it unmarketable.
In a nutshell, nobody ever cared how well it was received outside of Bell Labs.
It's an odd failing of incredibly smart people that their needs are the same as everyone else's. It seems to be very common (maybe dumb people make the same mistake as well, but you just don't notice it as much)
Does anyone know if you can boot Plan 9 in text mode?
However well-designed the OS is internally, it also needs to be approachable externally.