4 ms·

A Plan 9 user yelling at clouds. He does have some valid points, but his insults don't help. And no, troff is neither elegant nor capable ;)

deleted 5y ago
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woodruffw 5y ago
> And no, troff is neither elegant nor capable ;) I accurately guessed that this essay/screed(?) was typeset in troff, given the abundance of minor formatting and typesetting errors. This particular kind of "return to tradition" OS zealotry has always deeply bewildered me: our own dear author can't complete an essay in troff without scattering errors all over the place, so why in the world are they encouraging professional users to give up all of the functionality that prevents these errors?
- dansimonm 5y ago
  I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. There is no doubt that MS Office has more formatting finesse then troff. I did not mean to deny this, my point was simply that troff is good enough for many everyday needs, such as writing my article. The old NASA space pen vs Russian pencils can illustrate my point of view: It does not impress me that MS Office has slightly more finesse then the humble troff "pencil" when it is millions of lines of code more "expensive". But yes, more sophisticated software is needed on occasion. The existence of pencils do not necessitate the burning of all pens and the persecution of its wielders. I apologize if my article causes offense, it is written in a somewhat opinionated style, in the hope of creating a humorous read. But I'm sure a tad bit of arrogance also slipped through... If on the other hand you are refering simply to typo's, then yes, I do rightly deserve criticism. I have a light reading disorder and my mother tongue is not English. But I am working on this :)
marttt 5y ago
He has also written comprehensive desktop guides for Plan 9 [1], Slackware [2] and Unix console [3], this time in HTML. He has clearly put a lot of thought into getting familiar with these systems. In terms of aesthetics/visual humor, the 9front FQA [4] may have been an inspiration here. Really interesting to see Plan9/9front coming closer to laypeople (of which I sure am one) through this kind of discussions year by year. Maybe it is not that much of a fringe OS any more? 1: https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2019/plan9_desktop.html https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2019/plan9_desktop.html 2: https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2018/slackware_desktop.html https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2018/slackware_desktop.htm... 3: https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2018/console_desktop.html https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2018/console_desktop.html 4: http://fqa.9front.org/ http://fqa.9front.org/
- pjmlp 5y ago
  9front has been adopted by WSL as the filesystem protocol, so there is that. https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2019/02/16/plan-9-rides-again-wsl-file-access/ https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2019/02/16/plan-9-rides-aga...

deleted 5y ago

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woodruffw 5y ago

> And no, troff is neither elegant nor capable ;) I accurately guessed that this essay/screed(?) was typeset in troff, given the abundance of minor formatting and typesetting errors. This particular kind of "return to tradition" OS zealotry has always deeply bewildered me: our own dear author can't complete an essay in troff without scattering errors all over the place, so why in the world are they encouraging professional users to give up all of the functionality that prevents these errors?

dansimonm 5y ago
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. There is no doubt that MS Office has more formatting finesse then troff. I did not mean to deny this, my point was simply that troff is good enough for many everyday needs, such as writing my article. The old NASA space pen vs Russian pencils can illustrate my point of view: It does not impress me that MS Office has slightly more finesse then the humble troff "pencil" when it is millions of lines of code more "expensive". But yes, more sophisticated software is needed on occasion. The existence of pencils do not necessitate the burning of all pens and the persecution of its wielders. I apologize if my article causes offense, it is written in a somewhat opinionated style, in the hope of creating a humorous read. But I'm sure a tad bit of arrogance also slipped through... If on the other hand you are refering simply to typo's, then yes, I do rightly deserve criticism. I have a light reading disorder and my mother tongue is not English. But I am working on this :)

marttt 5y ago

He has also written comprehensive desktop guides for Plan 9 [1], Slackware [2] and Unix console [3], this time in HTML. He has clearly put a lot of thought into getting familiar with these systems. In terms of aesthetics/visual humor, the 9front FQA [4] may have been an inspiration here. Really interesting to see Plan9/9front coming closer to laypeople (of which I sure am one) through this kind of discussions year by year. Maybe it is not that much of a fringe OS any more? 1: https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2019/plan9_desktop.html https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2019/plan9_desktop.html 2: https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2018/slackware_desktop.html https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2018/slackware_desktop.htm... 3: https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2018/console_desktop.html https://pspodcasting.net/dan/blog/2018/console_desktop.html 4: http://fqa.9front.org/ http://fqa.9front.org/

pjmlp 5y ago
9front has been adopted by WSL as the filesystem protocol, so there is that. https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2019/02/16/plan-9-rides-again-wsl-file-access/ https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2019/02/16/plan-9-rides-aga...