Think different. Think very different! No, you're not thinking different enough! Think so differently that thinking becomes not-thinking and different is different from different! Until your mind becomes no-mind and your thoughts are un-thoughts! Astrally project your self into space, beyond the reaches of the galaxy where time is not time...
Sorry, got carried away. Just wanted to get you in the mood. Welcome to Plan 9 from Bell Labs - the weirdest operating system ever conceived! Visitors checking out my past three entries reviewing Belenix, GNU/HURD, and FreeSBIE, might have cause to wonder what was keeping me from experiencing those systems fully and why I reported such struggles with learning them. That's because I was fooling with plan9 the whole time in the background - which was burning every spare cycle I have.
Let me lay a big card on the table right now: I would not recommend this system as your day-to-day OS. Not even! But, as is frequently pointed out, it makes an amusing toy. Oh, yeah! If you're a hobbyist geek, you can give yourself a nice present by downloading the live CD (which also installs!) and keeping it around. How would I describe plan9 in a word? CUTE!!!
plan9 is not Unix, is not DOS, is not Mac. It exists in its own sphere. Its shell is rc. Its window manager is rio. Its file manager is acme. Its editor is sam. It has about 30% of the commands familiar from the Unix/Linux console world, and some behavior in common with Unix, but there the similarities end. The documentation goes on extensively about how they set out to throw out all preconceived notions of what an operating system is and start *clean*. And they made considerable efforts to change everything, even (it could be argued) in places where the old way was good.
The learning curve was absolutely vertical. I had to start over from scratch learning how to give commands, how to run programs, how to mount writable media, how to display pictures and play games and read man pages and HTML files, how to copy and paste. Copy and paste is actually "snarf and paste" though I would recommend that if you change "copy" to "snarf", you should follow suit and change "paste" to "barf".
Nevertheless, plan9 pulled me in like a tornado. Its interface is very tasteful. The color scheme is soft and gentle. The window manager is efficient. The fonts are adorable. The mascot "Glenda" is huggable. Every time I look at it, I think of the "Miffy and Friends" TV show theme song: "Miffy! Cute little bunny! Miffy! Smart little bunny!" plan9 can do truly crazy tricks, such as:
You can type or edit text *anywhere* there's a screen. You can literally type a command in midair in acme and then middle-click to execute it. You can type your file in the middle of the man page you're viewing and save it. You make a screen shot not with a special utility, but merely by piping /dev/screen to a file. There is no menu with executable programs; you type everything in a terminal window, which will then take off and morph into whatever program you told it to be. You generally work with one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard; and your mouse had *better* have three-button functionality or you're out of luck. There is no special viewer that has to run for man pages or html files; instead, the printed text is simply dumped out to your screen, and you scroll out of it to get back to a terminal command prompt. You can run the rio window manager inside of a window running in rio...as many nested instances as you want! It takes some time for computing habits to return to normal when using other operating systems after running plan9 for a while.
plan9 has lots of downsides. The console is missing tab completion and up-arrow command recall. Thus, if you type out a command string and blow it, your only choice rather than hitting up-arrow and fixing your previous typo is to highlight the previous command line with the mouse, middle-click to snarf, click back to your current prompt, middle-click to paste...this put me off. Another bone to pick is, once you have a file system mounted and accessing a file and you then start a new program, you have to mount it *again* to access the same system...mounted systems apply only to that window in which they were mounted. This means that when you're done playing with everything, you then have to be careful to *unmount* (yes, they put the 'n' back in!) each individual instance, or you hose things up.
Other downsides are the obvious: it's virtually unknown to the world, so docs are scanty and support is seldom. There is a small nest of developers porting applications to it ( some really unexpected ones, like Firefox, Xaos, and POVray ), but not anywhere near the same as for Linux/BSD, or even Solaris. It has been around for a while, slowly being built, but seems to not have a user/developer community so much as it has a cult. Yes, a cult following! It lacks appeal for 95% of the world, but it's cream to the weirdo 5%.
And it has my attention! If it only caught on, it could kick ass! plan9 shows us another world that could have been, almost like what computers would be like in an alternate dimension. It is fascinating, and worth the time just for the curiosity value. Besides, programs for it can still be written in plain ol' everyday C, and it runs Perl and Python! How difficult to adapt could it be???
UPDATE 7/23/06: For those of you just joining us from places like Slashdot or OSNews (after a couple of hops): I reviewed this from the point of view of a Linux user experimenting with other free and open operating systems; part of a grand tour that included BSD, Solaris, and GNU/HURD. I openly admitted that I was struggling to learn it in three days or so while I was blogging this little tour. I think I made it clear that I genuinely *like* plan9.
19 feedbacks
Comments:
And thank god the firefox port is a joke. There are quite a few web browsers for Plan 9, all of them homebrew.
Next time make sure you first read the wiki ( http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/plan_9_wiki/ ), the papers ( http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Papers/ ) and the man pages.
People much smarter than you use Plan 9 every day, don't think you will "get it" without some effort.
And there is no need to unmount anything, just close the window. Learning how 9P works helps...
I hope k's attitude isn't common among Plan 9 people.
Heh, it doesn't seem to be. But the smaller the niche, the fiercer the loyalty within that niche. It's just part of the geek nature.
K, you fail.
Brian Kernighan would never say something like this (he wrote Plan 9)
This is one of the favorable reviews I've met so far about Plan 9
However, in regards to the operating system, I honestly thought that this OS would be a great successor to UNIX. It is after all historically in the position to do so. However it seems these guys do in fact live in another dimension because it lacks basic functionality we rightly deserve in 2009.
In the comments I read from a visitor calling himself "k", saying that smarter people use this operating system. Damn, that's so arrogant. So much for your emotional intelligence, which is the greater amount of knowledge acquisition done in adult life.
The operating system fails in many fundamental areas and being unintuitive it makes it difficult to find any reason to continue learning. I hardly think Windows is superior to Mac just because it is harder to use.
After all, the performance of an operating system is trivial if it cannot access data or programs that are fundamental to our 21 century lifestyle.
As a programmer myself, having eight years of experience at University(Computer Science), I know how to use a damn computer and various operating systems out there. Still this OS doesn't even respond to fundamental terminal commands!
Seriously, when terminal functionality is restricted then I'm calling it a total failure.
The best thing about this operating system was reading this funny review and laughing my ass off.
Thanks for this awesome and hilarious review, it alleviated all of my frustration in one go.
Tristam.
working on setting up the wiki on my virtual instance of it on my home computer.
I use Plan9 every work day to display a linux box in a VNC and to do my mail
--snip--
I've played with plan9 a few times, and unfortunately in my experience people like "k" abound in the plan 9 community.
You can't even RTFM because often the docs are missing and or outdated.
I've seen time and again that if you want to do something that plan9 doesn't do use vnc and get a linux box.
I like plan9 and I'm currently trying to get it to run again. It has a lot of cool features and is a nifty toy, but it is a failure as an operating system so far.
There are many people that are so concerned that the plan9 "paradigm" not be tainted that the OS has stagnated.
Applications for plan9 to do day to day things? Mostly nonexistant or bad.
Driver support? Same story.
Interface? In my opinion, it's the worst I've ever used. Even after trying to force myself to stomach it and "learn to like it".
The nasty part is that plan9 is full of great ideas.
Unfortunately until it gets open sourced, re-written or the few assholes in the community die off or lose clout the best hope for all those great ideas is that they get incorporated into linux.
Fun litte toy though. Nice review too.
Please direct flames to /dev/null
your lifestyle is hardly relevant to computational science
"Still this OS doesn't even respond to fundamental terminal commands!"
i don't even know how to formulate a response to that
"You can't even RTFM because often the docs are missing and or outdated."
i've found plan 9's man pages to be the best there are. better than linux's, windows's, mac's, and bsd's. you can always rtfs, which isn't so hard as you might think
"Unfortunately until it gets open sourced [...]"
plan 9 was open sourced about 8 years ago. the source is on the cd
"Brian Kernighan [...] wrote Plan 9"
not really
please direct flames to /dev/audio
