4 ms·

I cannot tell if you are responding tongue in cheek (in what seems to be a Plan 9 tradition) or being serious. My points are not that any of these tools are be

by gonzus 6y ago

I cannot tell if you are responding tongue in cheek (in what seems to be a Plan 9 tradition) or being serious. My points are not that any of these tools are better or worse than the others; I am trying to say that I would like to play with Plan 9 as a working environment, but cannot because it lacks most of the tools I want / need to use. I don't use Go. I use C, some C++, and Typescript (so, Node). Why would I have to avoid those? Most importantly, if I have to (seriously) avoid Firefox, what is the alternative that will allow me to surf the modern web, which (again) I NEED to do daily? If the answer is "nope, Plan 9 is not intended for this type of user" then I guess that's fine, although sad to me, because I cannot play around with something that is appealing to me. And, again, if this is the case, it would be interesting (to me) to understand WHY: why is there no Firefox (or any modern browser) for Plan 9. From another comment, I learned there IS vim ported to it, so I guess that means it is fundamentally possible to port medium-complexity software. Maybe nobody else cares about having these things in Plan 9, which again, is fine. Cheers.

drybjed 6y ago
Linux has almost 30 years of active development behind it, thousands of people wrote projects for it, which were then used by others. "Firefox" is not a simple application, it depends on multitude of other software and libraries to run. Let's see just the runtime dependencies from the Debian Stable `firefox-esr` package: libatk1.0-0 libc6 libcairo-gobject2 libcairo2 libdbus-1-3 libdbus-glib-1-2 libevent-2.1-6 libffi6 libfontconfig1 libfreetype6 libgcc1 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libpango-1.0-0 libstdc++6 libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb-shm0 libxcb1 libxcomposite1 libxdamage1 libxext6 libxfixes3 libxrender1 zlib1g fontconfig procps debianutils And that's just runtime dependencies, I'm not sure what you need to compile it in the first place. Don't forget that these may have their own dependencies and so on... And for comparison, runtime dependencies of the `nvi` package which is probably closer to that vim port than normal `vim` package in Debian: libc6 libdb5.3 libncursesw6 libtinfo6 Much less software overhead. If you want the Firefox experience from your typical Linux distribution on Plan 9, somebody needs to either port all these libraries, or provide functional equivalents. The problem is that for the longest time Plan 9 license was not favorable for anyone wanting to develop it further - that's why we have all these forks and re-implementations around, which increases fragmentation. Hopefully now, that Plan 9 has been opened fully, there's a Foundation behind the project, people will pick it up again and start porting stuff to it. Forks could be folded back into the main project if their developers would want to. But don't expect Firefox right away just yet. Also, don't forget that Linux had 20 years of development in its UI and UX department; Plan 9 didn't. You can see on the Plan 9 Foundation GSoC page[1] that there are plans to work on this part of the OS. When the work is done, hopefully more people will be attracted to the platform itself, which will mean more hands to work on porting or developing other software, and there's a chance that we can snowball an alternative ecosystem from there. [1]: http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc-2021-ideas/index.html http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc-2021-ideas/index.html
- efreak 6y ago
  I vaguely recall there was some project a while back to get firefox running in the frame buffer. So the xorg dependencies can possibly be removed/replaced. Dbus is probably also not technically required to run firefox. For removing xorg dependency from a web browser that isn't Firefox, I believe there is in fact a project for running webkit in a framebuffer, called WPE Webkit [0] (I'm well aware that this doesn't mean you can run these on p9, just pointing out that xorg isn't a hard dependency) [0]: https://wpewebkit.org https://wpewebkit.org
- gonzus 6y ago
  Thank you so much for this answer, which fits my question perfectly: it provides a plausible reason for the meager offer of packages for Plan 9 (the reason being the fragmentation of the ecosystem). I second your hopes that this situation will change in the (near) future. And just to clarify, I used Firefox only as an example of a modern open source web browser. I don't really much care which browser it is, as long as it is relatively modern.

by gonzus 6y ago

drybjed 6y ago

Linux has almost 30 years of active development behind it, thousands of people wrote projects for it, which were then used by others. "Firefox" is not a simple application, it depends on multitude of other software and libraries to run. Let's see just the runtime dependencies from the Debian Stable `firefox-esr` package: libatk1.0-0 libc6 libcairo-gobject2 libcairo2 libdbus-1-3 libdbus-glib-1-2 libevent-2.1-6 libffi6 libfontconfig1 libfreetype6 libgcc1 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libpango-1.0-0 libstdc++6 libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb-shm0 libxcb1 libxcomposite1 libxdamage1 libxext6 libxfixes3 libxrender1 zlib1g fontconfig procps debianutils And that's just runtime dependencies, I'm not sure what you need to compile it in the first place. Don't forget that these may have their own dependencies and so on... And for comparison, runtime dependencies of the `nvi` package which is probably closer to that vim port than normal `vim` package in Debian: libc6 libdb5.3 libncursesw6 libtinfo6 Much less software overhead. If you want the Firefox experience from your typical Linux distribution on Plan 9, somebody needs to either port all these libraries, or provide functional equivalents. The problem is that for the longest time Plan 9 license was not favorable for anyone wanting to develop it further - that's why we have all these forks and re-implementations around, which increases fragmentation. Hopefully now, that Plan 9 has been opened fully, there's a Foundation behind the project, people will pick it up again and start porting stuff to it. Forks could be folded back into the main project if their developers would want to. But don't expect Firefox right away just yet. Also, don't forget that Linux had 20 years of development in its UI and UX department; Plan 9 didn't. You can see on the Plan 9 Foundation GSoC page[1] that there are plans to work on this part of the OS. When the work is done, hopefully more people will be attracted to the platform itself, which will mean more hands to work on porting or developing other software, and there's a chance that we can snowball an alternative ecosystem from there. [1]: http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc-2021-ideas/index.html http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc-2021-ideas/index.html

efreak 6y ago
I vaguely recall there was some project a while back to get firefox running in the frame buffer. So the xorg dependencies can possibly be removed/replaced. Dbus is probably also not technically required to run firefox. For removing xorg dependency from a web browser that isn't Firefox, I believe there is in fact a project for running webkit in a framebuffer, called WPE Webkit [0] (I'm well aware that this doesn't mean you can run these on p9, just pointing out that xorg isn't a hard dependency) [0]: https://wpewebkit.org https://wpewebkit.org
gonzus 6y ago
Thank you so much for this answer, which fits my question perfectly: it provides a plausible reason for the meager offer of packages for Plan 9 (the reason being the fragmentation of the ecosystem). I second your hopes that this situation will change in the (near) future. And just to clarify, I used Firefox only as an example of a modern open source web browser. I don't really much care which browser it is, as long as it is relatively modern.