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As someone who worked on Plan 9 for over a decade, it would be incredibly difficult. The first question out of everyone's mouth, even back in the early 2000s: "
by floren 9y ago
As someone who worked on Plan 9 for over a decade, it would be incredibly difficult. The first question out of everyone's mouth, even back in the early 2000s: "So can you run [Mozilla/Firefox] on it?" No, we couldn't and that was with a very POSIX-like system; the browser is the killer app today and it's also an operating system all its own, meaning it's one of the hardest things to port. We had enough of a basic browser that you could read HTML pages, but otherwise you're stuck with 'linuxemu' which only worked up to a certain (old) version of Debian because the Linux kernel changed shit. If you decide POSIX is a bad paradigm, you're going to have an even harder time getting a browser running.
Of course, most of the shit we do with junky web apps today could just be presented as a 9P service with maybe a couple shell scripts in front of it, but the junky web apps already exist and are in use.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pmarreck 9y agoI'll give you a lot of credit for working on Plan9 that long... but yeah, you're correct, a browser port would require a fairly large and well-funded team at this point, on any new OS
- sillysaurus3 9y agoAnyone have links to the plan9 propaganda pictures? Some of them were hilarious. https://imgur.com/a/Q4aMc https://imgur.com/a/Q4aMc "There is no fork." Apparently they're from 9front, a fork of plan9: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617036 http://9front.org/img/ http://9front.org/img/ is filled with a bunch of random stuff. The diagram of plan9 at http://9front.org/img/fs.png http://9front.org/img/fs.png seems useful. "Plan9 has been forked": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2772718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2772718 Note the discussion on rc, plan9's scripting language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2773275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2773275 Maybe someone can borrow some ideas for their next OS. EDIT: Aha: http://9front.org/propaganda/ http://9front.org/propaganda/
- pmarreck 9y agoThis is fascinating!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rcarmo 9y agoYep. I’m on 9fans, and agree wholeheartedly. Porting a browser would be the _one_ thing to do to be able to run Plan9 as a personal desktop, but it’s a monumental task that will never happen.
- Eridrus 9y agoI think that this is kind of backwards, yes, a new user OS must run a browser, but this is a much simpler situation than "Must run Win32 software".