[drsintoma]

I up-voted this in "new" in the hopes of an interesting debate from smarter people than me about why Plan 9 didn't succeed or what would it take for a new OS to break the status quo. But 2 hours in, 0 comments. Is there really nothing to say anymore about this?

Okay. here's a question: how would the world look like today had Android started based on Plan 9 instead of Linux?

[jeffreyrogers]

My understanding of Plan 9 is that the primary benefits it brought are in its ability to make a large collection of computers look like one unified system. So rather than asking what would it look like if Android was based on Plan 9, I'd think of it as: what would it look like if my laptop, TV, and smartphone all ran Plan 9.

I think then you'd have a scenario in which, for example, you can pick up your phone and tell your TV to start streaming some file you have on your laptop. You can probably do this now using some collection of complicated programs that you have to install, but with Plan 9 it would be easy since everything appeared to be just one part of a larger computing system.

Or another example: you're working at your office with a desktop computer running Plan 9. Then you leave the office for the night, but want to finish something at home, so you open up your laptop and have access to all your work files as if they are stored locally on your laptop. You just edit them in place and the copy at work is automatically updated as you go.

So that's how things would be different I think. Not revolutionary, but definitely an improvement on what we have now. (Note: I'm not a Plan 9 expert and have never actually used it, however, I do find the ideas from it interesting and have read a bit about it, so I think the above is fairly accurate).

[sampo]

> Then you leave the office for the night, but want to finish something at home, so you open up your laptop and have access to all your work files as if they are stored locally on your laptop. You just edit them in place and the copy at work is automatically updated as you go.

I do this all the time, Gnome file manager (Nautilus) mounts my work computer over sftp with three mouse clicks (Connect to Server / select server / Connect).

Granted, I can only work on the remote files in Nautilus, and with GUI programs than I launch by right-clicking on the files in Nautilus. If I want a command line, I need to do some other, but also simple, tricks.

[MichaelGG]

That all sounds neat, but how does it work on less than ideal networks? The non trivial jitter and latency would mess up programs that assume things are local. Even things like buffering audio needs to be network aware. If local, low latency can be achieved. If remote, then buffer to avoid skips.

I'm a bit suspicious of things that make network access transparent.

[Swizec]

> Or another example: you're working at your office with a desktop computer running Plan 9. Then you leave the office for the night, but want to finish something at home, so you open up your laptop and have access to all your work files as if they are stored locally on your laptop. You just edit them in place and the copy at work is automatically updated as you go.

So basically an IP nightmare for many companies?

[fafner]

I think one of the main reasons why Plan 9 didn't succeed, was simply the fact that it wasn't free software from the beginning. Plan 9 was released around the same time as Linux. But it was treated as a secret and then tried to be directly marketed. That way it simply missed the opportunity that Linux took because Linux was free software. Only in 2002 was Plan 9 released under a free software license.

[didibus]

My understanding is that Plan 9 is the original intent of Unix materialized. That is, the fundamental concept that everything is a file.

Plan 9 managed to prove that everything can be a file.

I think the difference would have been that some things would be easier to achieve, if Android had been built around Plan9. But Plan9 itself doesn't have the maturity that Linux has, so bringing it to maturity would have taken time.

[pjmlp]

> Plan 9 managed to prove that everything can be a file.

I am not convinced about GPU performance specially when Plan9 has a simple 2D software render.

[typedweb]

Here's a port of inferno (a Plan9 derivative idea) running on android phones called HellaPhone:

https://bitbucket.org/floren/inferno/wiki/Home

[hollerith]

Here is my theory on one of the reasons Plan 9 did not succeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392030

[yellow_and_gray]

When I tried to run Plan 9 in a VM I gave up because I couldn't figure out how to open a shell in the window manager and type ls. I also couldn't figure out how to use the text editor (why can't editors be simple enough so you can just type?) If Plan 9 booted in text/terminal mode I'd use it.

Does anyone know if you can boot Plan 9 in text mode?

However well-designed the OS is internally, it also needs to be approachable externally.

[at-fates-hands]

You points seem pretty obvious. In order to get people to switch, at least some basic functionality people use everyday should be the same.

Without similar basic functionality, people will use it briefly, get frustrated, and then never use your OS again. They're also going to tell all their friends and your new OS is dumpster bound before it even gets out of beta.

[justincormack]

The ideas from Plan 9 are very compelling, and parts of them, like namespacing, have been adopted, thats why we have Docker now to some extent. But for operating systems, build from scratch is hard, there is a lot of code. But it is getting easier. See it as the prototype...

[stormbrew]

Plan9-style namespacing -- as something that users can do directly without privilege -- has definitely not been adopted outside plan9. What we have is a pale pale shadow of the capabilities exposed by that.

Unfortunately, true user control over the namespace is incompatible with the unix security model (thanks to setuid being the only means of privilege escalation), and the namespace compositing that makes, for example, just stacking bin directories onto /bin instead of using a PATH requires that it be possible to have more than one file with the same name in the same view to work well, which is (probably?) incompatible with POSIX.

[cyorir]

As far as why Plan 9 didn't break the status quo, I'll have to agree with what Eric Raymond said in 2003[0]: Plan 9 was not "compelling enough," whereas Unix was "good enough."

In my own opinion, a sufficient number of people, projects, and services were already using Unix-based systems, and they had constructed their projects and services around this Unix model. The marginal benefits of Plan 9 were not great enough to offer sufficient incentive to deviate from the Unix model.

[0] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html

[EdiX]

ESR is wrong on this point. Not completely wrong, I can imagine a world where things went differently and his assessment was correct but it's not the world we live in. Plan 9 "failed" because it spent almost 2 decades between "almost impossible to license" and "almost unmaintained". AT&T was more concerned with preventing anyone but them from making money off of Plan 9 than they were concerned with actually making money off of Plan 9. Lucent only got it long after the ship had already sailed, they don't seem to know what to do with it, it's commendable (and surprising) that they did not just gun it down.

[mveety]

Plan 9 is a terrible choice for a phone. It's meant more for networks of devices that work together instead of standalone devices that download shit. I don't use Plan 9 when I'm away from my fileserver and cpu servers because it looses a lot of the flexibility and what I love about it. I think that if you replace Linux with Plan 9 the world would look largely the same. It would probably work better together though.

[ori_b]

>It's meant more for networks of devices that work together instead of standalone devices that download shit.

Why should my phone just be a standalone device that just downloads shit? I wasn't a phone that can access that screen on my TV and send videos that sit on my file server, or can check 9p enabled sensors and display their status, our integrate with all sorts of crap around my house or at work.

Rio, acme, and rc would be an awful match for phone hardware, but the plan 9 kernel and 9p protocol would be very nice.

[mortdeus]

Plan9 failed because of a failure of efficient marketing and executive management.

http://usphoenix.net/science,%20technology/what_really_happe...

[mortdeus]

Though its fair to say that the ideas first introduced in plan9 lives on today as technologies like Go and Docker.

[Aloha]

Very will written if short piece.

Plan9 failed because lucent failed.

[rodgerd]

If the conniptions over changes like kdbus and systemd s any guide, one problems is that there are too many people invested in "that's the way we've always done it."

The fact the Gods of Unix moved on doesn't seem to bother people.

[vezzy-fnord]

I don't see how kdbus and systemd are relevant here. The design philosophy of the latter is just about a polar opposite to that of Plan 9.

On the other hand, major Unices being more Plan 9-esque would actually bring them closer to the Unix philosophy that opponents of the aforementioned technologies frequently cite.