[sampo]

> Then you leave the office for the night, but want to finish something at home, so you open up your laptop and have access to all your work files as if they are stored locally on your laptop. You just edit them in place and the copy at work is automatically updated as you go.

I do this all the time, Gnome file manager (Nautilus) mounts my work computer over sftp with three mouse clicks (Connect to Server / select server / Connect).

Granted, I can only work on the remote files in Nautilus, and with GUI programs than I launch by right-clicking on the files in Nautilus. If I want a command line, I need to do some other, but also simple, tricks.

[rakoo]

Plan 9 goes far beyond than that. Everything can be shared automatically, because everything is a file. Here are some scenarios that should be possible:

- You can access files remotely automatically from any application (akin to what sshfs does)

- You can access non-files remotely automatically: a printer is just a fd you write to

- A GPU from a distant cluster is just a resource you can use as if it were local (I'm speaking of implementation, not performance).

- A mail service can be accessed on a mail server, which is itself not connected to the wild internet but goes through a firewall... itself accessible through the same file protocol. Oh and the mail you want to send sits in your outbox on your phone, so you just grab it from your computer.

- You can play the music that lives on your machine on the speakers anywhere in your house by communicating with the remote fd

- One of the dream of Rob Pike (co-inventor) is that you wouldn't need a multi-core machine in your pocket for your mobile lives, you'd only need a good connection so you can access all resources on any server that is connected to the network. Your "smartphone" would then just be a terminal to pilot all your resources.

All of this accessible with the same interface, available in the OS. It may be have been a ludicrous dream, especially when we look at how much data would have been shuffling between machines, but the prospect of such networking still sounds awesome.

[infinite8s]

IO devices were also mounted/manipulable within this filesystem. So you could mount your home keyboard/mouse/monitor to your remote workstation (maybe an HPC box in some datacenter) and continue working where you left off. Java tried something similar with Jini but without the powerful abstract of everything being a file descriptor in some hierarchical mapping.

[sampo]

So, could we imagine a startup making Internet of Things, and smart homes, and basing their tech on Plan 9 instead of Linux?

[rakoo]

At this point I'm not sure it's worth it. We've got far more covered by just using a working Linux and taping specific protocols together than trying to make Plan 9 even work everywhere (If we're talking IoT, we're talking exotic hardware, so there's much much more chance Linux will need less work to be adapted, if not already done)

On top of that, we already have some platforms to use on Linux: the Erlang VM already has a notion of "global cluster of things" where the actual location of a resource doesn't have an impact on how things are executed (other than performance). The plan9 utilities are also partly ported to run on Linux; maybe we could try to run services that speak 9p/9p2000/styx on top of Linux ? That would be more useful.

[fit2rule]

Sure. Sign me up. Also, ContikiOS.

[killnine]

it is absolutely not a ludacris dream. I've been dreaming it for years. All my machines run linux. As long as I'm NOT on a phone or tablet, I sign in, ssh, restore tmux/screen session, and pull X via xpra.

Why my phone is unable to be a terminal to all my other machines is beyond me.

I should have 1 hard drive and 1 "computer", and 1 desktop. Every other machine should be a window to this desktop.

At least... in my dream world.

[protomyth]

I mean no disrespect but sampo's comment illustrates the problem plan 9 and any other advance has. "I can already do that, but" beats unification and concept so easily. You cannot just build a better, simpler foundation, you absolutely must demonstrate something new or dress it up with "chrome". We don't care about the better mousetrap. I can put together a clunkier solution that does what your new concept does is almost a point of pride. We all do it, and I wonder how it affects are advances.

[Lambdanaut]

I disagree. Optimizing for doing something better than the previous solution is always a viable solution, and it will drive customers.

Though, momentum is unfortunately the largest mover of sales and vendor lock-in. Plan 9 never built that momentum.

[Ologn]

* Create an NFS mount to a directory holding thousands of images. Create another NFS mount with directories and subdirectories holding many files of any type.

* Open Nautilus

* Go to Edit -> Preferences. Click on the Preview tab

* Set Show Thumbnails to "Local Files Only" and "Count Number of Items" to "Local Files Only"

Then click on the NFS mounted directory in Nautilus.

You will not have any fun.

This bug has been sitting in the Nautilus bug tracker for over three years.

A fix would not be rocket science, just rewording what it says in the Preview tab would be a fix. Three years gone by and they can't even reword it. Which is fine, but it doesn't say much for the file manager and its inter-OS operability.

[EdiX]

You would probably be better served by writing a 2 lines bash script to call sshfs and have it mounted through fuse. I don't see a point in going through GIO monstrosity for this.