At last, Git gets its first usability advantage over Mercurial:
https://bitbucket.org/oridb/git9/src/default/

Not mine, but ... wow!

I saw that. It is impressive! I read a bit through it and the guy removed the whole concept of "staging" entirely, thus making git more straightforward, but less powerful as well.

That would help getting plan9 back on the scene!

I'm not sure whether anyone will switch to Plan 9 just to get this, but it surely makes using Plan 9 for developing cool stuff notably more interesting.

Note that the repository is a Mercurial repository though.

Of course people won't switch to plan9 _for_ this. But that makes plan9 more interesting to use!

Pretty cool concept, I love that mapping into the fs that plan9 does with a lot of things.

It reminds me of FUSE but it is far from what plan9 is achieving.
For example:
https://polyfloyd.net/post/soundcloud-fuse-mpd/
https://github.com/ChrisRx/dungeonfs

FUSE and similar concepts (Dokany on Windows) try to mirror what Plan 9 does on kernels which don't know about that into a userland that doesn't know about that. Even with FUSE, you cannot just "write into any window" by mounting the related application.

But it is better than nothing and plan9port adds at least enough APIs to achieve the desired results. I think more software should do that.

This will probably shift the discussion a bit, but is plan9 honestly usable as a daily OS ? (putting aside the fact that its web browser cannot deal with the mess 5.0 the web is right now).

Its web browsers - with Mothra probably being the least bad one - are fine if you don't rely on webshit for your daily work. As the Harvey project is mostly stalled and Jehanne lacks manpower, the first steps into efforts to port NetSurf to Plan 9's APE(X) library have not come far yet.

With this elephant out of the room, I think it depends on what you want to achieve. Plan 9 is a sufficient operating system for Go (and, at least, because of the special syntaxes, some C and shell) programming and its Fossil/Venti file system combination makes it a fine backup station, especially when clustered with other Plan 9 machines. Nevertheless, I don't think that anyone who runs an actual desktop system, even if it's KolibriOS or RISC OS, would have an advantage from completely moving over to Plan 9.

It has its niche and it fills that niche well.

Plan 9 is very usable as a side of a webshit-capable OS through drawterm. You can spin a hardware-accelerated qemu (not a lot of RAM needed) with port forwarding, and then connect to it through drawterm:

- You will have a native X11 window acting as a native rio window (the Plan9 WM for everyone to know).
- Clipboard is very well integrated.
- You have /mnt/term/* in plan9 that points to /* in your local system for easy file transfer, so you can use the remote system as your local editor!
- Reasonable performances permits me to run plan 9 on a VPS in same country and still have it smooth (even without a fiber connection with ~15 employee all with YouTube running on an office)!

(16-04-2019, 05:18 AM)jkl Wrote: As the Harvey project is mostly stalled and Jehanne lacks manpower, the first steps into efforts to port NetSurf to Plan 9's APE(X) library have not come far yet.

I stand corrected.

https://github.com/netsurf-plan9/netsurf...n9?files=1

Ohhhh man, netsurf just full on works now. git9 is stable, etc etc. I use 9 as a daily driver, and if I ever need a modern browser I just vncclient into something on a Unix/Linux machine.

Looks like 2020 could be the year of the 9 desktop. ;o)

(12-05-2020, 03:13 AM)Halfwit Wrote: I use 9 as a daily driver

Now I'm curious ! How is it like for your usage ? What do you do everyday that make 9 suitable for it ?
Would you care to describe your install ? (Perhaps a new post would be best suited for it)

This has to be a huge coincidence, but I stumbled upon this book: http://lsub.org/who/nemo/9.intro.pdf

I haven't finished reading it, but what I love is that it is an introduction to plan 9 for computing begginers. It takes you by the hand to discover the OS, and doesn't reflect the ellitism that is usually associated with cat-v or 9front.

Definitely a good read to understand most plan 9 concepts. I'll try to spin up a plan 9 VM to follow the book while trying examples.

The book is incorrect right at its start though.

Quote:Traditionally, Operating Systems courses used UNIX to do this. However, today there is no such thing as UNIX.

There actually is. However, I immediately feel better with the book:

Quote:Linux is a huge system, full of inconsistencies, with programs that do multiple tasks and do not perform them well. Linux manual pages just cannot be read.

Ha!