Love the tailpiece! Rustic simplicity at its finest.

mail(1) or nedmail(1) is all I really need.

I prefer mutt/neomutt, but Thunderbird comes by default in basically every desktop-oriented distro I regularly interact with, so I end up using that most often on *nix. K-9 if I want it on my phone.

My true love is the combination of acme(1) and faces(1), but that doesn’t do encryption/PGP stuff.

You are correct and this can be seen in some of the old AT&T demos from the '80s floating around on YouTube. There is even a chart that specifically labels a directory like /usr/bwk as the user’s home.

Plan 9 also uses this old convention; users live under /usr and there is no /home.

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Plan 9 is still actively developed in the form of 9front; updates and new features trickle down to 9legacy from there.

The “original” Plan 9—meaning stock 4th Edition—is more of a museum piece at this point, though, yes.

I can say that, at least in the Southwestern US, our local Kroger stores all use Linux of some variety at their self-checkouts. I’ve seen the same as above: mostly CentOS and Rocky.

Sure, basically any Debian-based distro should have gdebi in its repos.

That’s not a photo of Dennis Ritchie, that’s Brian Kernighan.

Closest thing for bash would be ble.sh.

I think it really is as simple as our dorks from the Labs liking Ed Wood.

Same reason the mascot is named Glenda.

As in a less mouse-driven way to move around? Or just a straight up different window manager?

For the first, 9front has extras on top of Plan 9 – riow(1) and a /dev/kbdtap device described in rio(4) – to allow for more keyboard-driven workflows. It can make rio into a sort of mouse-driven i3/ratpoison-ish thing… kind of.

I autostart it with rio like this:

riow </dev/kbdtap >/dev/kbdtap |[3] mybar

where mybar is a shell function that prints the status bar at the bottom of the screen. That part is used to intercept mouse clicks and turn them into commands for the audio player, zuke.

No, but it comes with Doom as well as a bunch of other games and emulators. See games(1) and nintendo(1) for details.

Perhaps just PNU?

That would be the port of NetSurf.

On this machine I have everything except for Bluetooth and the fingerprint reader, neither of which I ever use anyway.

I certainly hope so.

In all seriousness, it seems to me that interest in Plan 9 will continue to grow from here, especially with 9front taking the lead and actually moving ahead with real development.

Oh sure, lots of things are “inconvenient” on Plan 9.

Of note for most would-be users: if you rely on a modern web browser like Firefox/Chrome, forget about it. Never going to happen.

It’s important to remember that Plan 9 is fundamentally a research operating system; it’s not really a “typical” environment by any stretch, and that stems largely from it being entirely network-based and distributed. A single Plan 9 system in isolation can only be so interesting. Using it on a laptop like this can be an entirely different set of problems.

If you’d like some examples of things you may face:

• booting can be slow

• can be intimidating to set up for some of the more important features – factotum(4) and secstore(1), new users and directories under /, etc.

• cwfs is slow

• hjfs is really slow

• no multi-monitor support

• only recently did we get a filesystem that specifically aims to be crash-safe

• poor documentation, though it’s been getting better

• reading research papers is basically a requirement for understanding the system

• security is not a priority

For me, though? I genuinely don’t need much more than what’s available in the base system.

I guess that depends on if you consider doing basically all of my day-to-day computing as doing anything “real”.

I use it for writing, email, programming, browsing, drawing, games… pretty much everything I would do on any other machine. Anything that I can’t do directly in Plan 9 is done by accessing from Plan 9.

• machine: ThinkPad T420

• os: ⑨front

  • auth+cpu+file on encrypted cwfs

• wm: rio + riow

• programs:

  • aux/statusmsg

  • bar

  • clock

  • faces

  • stats

  • zuke

• wallpaper

For those interested in learning more about Plan 9 and trying it out in a public environment: SDF Public Access UNIX System is hosting their seasonal Plan 9 Boot Camp starting June 20th. Feel free to drop into com and say hello!

I have an RPi4 and a 0W that run 9front as diskless terminals thanks to that effort. It works really well!

Richard Miller is one of the OGs; he did the first port of UNIX, and if you look into Plan 9 more you’ll see exactly how much of a connection to history it really is.