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Comment by haolez | Hacker News Reader

I have a spare mini-PC laying around and I was wondering if any of these OSes might be fun to play with. I'm leaning towards plan9 and 9front. Plan9 seems like an engineering marvel, while still very simple (I've checked the source code before). I don't know much about 9front, but I fear that I might give up the simplicity of Plan9 for some level of convenience.

Can anyone chime in on this topic?

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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.

Awesome! Do you use 9front?

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.

TIL

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

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.

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)

Oberon was quite interesting for its time, but you will get a hard time running it in modern hardware, even with the latest iteraction of it, Blue Bottle/AOS/Active Oberon, you will get a hard time getting ISOs.

The best to look at it, partially working, are browser emulations,

https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/

Between Plan 9 and Inferno, I suggest Inferno.

Descends from Plan 9, shows how the UNIX experience could be like when whole userspace is written in a memory safe language with dynamic loading and also you get to learn about Limbo influences Go's design.

Inferno is stuck in 32 bit land but there is a fork that works as 64 bit. I got it going on Mac OS as a 64 bit application (but only for Intel). Need to learn some ARM assembly I suppose.

MIT license really opened things up.

I also run aos/A2 Oberon systems. And I think it’d be awesome to port that to devdraw from plan9port for graphics on Unix systems. I just have not had the time.

That version of Oberon gets updates frequently also, and the Fox compiler system is really neat to play around with.

Async/await style concurrency was there before in .NET I think and Active Objects remind me of what Alan Kay really wanted from OOP (in a similar way that Erlang processes work)

Anyway it’s a language/OS nerd’s dream.

I get the feeling that when Felix Friedrich is no longer active at ETHZ, AOS won't be having much further work.

I mentioned it is hard to get, because keeping up with it requires having some background on AOS history, and even then newer ISO might only work on a VM, depending on which hardware one owns.

In anycase, here are some current links for others,

http://cas.inf.ethz.ch/projects/a2/activity

https://github.com/btreut/a2

9front is fine, it's just actively maintained

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