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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

It's trivial to get running in qemu if you're really curious.

Sure, but that doesn't seem to really be using Plan9, at least to me. Networked access seems so fundamental to Plan9 that running it in a sandbox seems like trying out a car with all the tires removed.

I'm interested in hearing what it's like to use it more seriously; my biggest doubts are around collaborating with people on conventional OSes.

Qemu allows full network access. It's a very porous "sandbox"

Maybe I misunderstood Plan9, but I figured that if remote services aren't speaking 9P then everything would be a bit kludgey. Like, using Acme on local files which you push up to Github seems to be somehow against the spirit of Plan9. I suppose you could just use it like any other Unix-like OS, but what's the point?

I think I'm convincing myself in this thread that it's not for me - but of course I think it's great that others are using it, I don't want to sound too negative.

I think it's more important that services can be exposed as filesystems like webfs or gitfs than that they are exposed as 9P.

I've used it as my "main driver" for around 6 months last year and I can assure you it's definitely practical, you can also easily interact with the other OSes with ssh and vnc, that way I could even do some remote video calls from plan9 with the help of another linux computer for instance.

There is an image for raspberry pi. I guess that can be a good way to force yourself into it. Just make sure to have vnc access to a linux, mac or windows computer if you need it for work too.

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