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

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