4 ms·

These "mainstream" browsers being so complicated is a large part of why I don't like them, but the reality is that no matter how much I don't like it, the web i

These "mainstream" browsers being so complicated is a large part of why I don't like them, but the reality is that no matter how much I don't like it, the web is unavoidable with the result that if I were to run Plan 9, I would need to run a second OS with which to browse the web (and I like to save snippets of the web, so I either need to keep those snippets on the second OS or rig something up to make it easy to send the snippets to my Plan 9 install). (And I regularly need to upload documents and images stored on my computer to the web, so I'd either need to keep my documents and images on the second OS or rig something up to avoid the tedium of manually copying the document or image every time from Plan 9 to the second OS so I could upload it.) I.e., not having any mainstream browser is a big deal for an OS, so when someone asked for a comparison between Plan 9 and Fuchsia, I thought I'd mention it. More precisely, it is a big deal for a user-facing OS, and Plan 9 is mostly user-facing. In fact, I've never heard of anyone using it as, e.g., a web server.

moody__ 3y ago
Indeed, thankfully using a 9front system from another OS is quite nice. My workstation at home is a Linux machine with a drawterm window open fullscreen. You can think of drawterm like our version of windows RDP, with a shared clipboard and a way of sharing files seamlessly between the host and the remote system. Under the hood, drawterm is just an implementation of /dev/draw that gets given to a remote system, so you're not forwarding compressed images but individual draw RPC messages. Over a LAN connection you can even play doom at 1080p.
- hollerith 3y ago
  What's the security story like for 9front? For years, Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS and ChromeOS has used a verified boot process that prevents any malware from surviving a reboot in any of the system software, i.e., anywhere except for the user's home directory and maybe other directories created by the user that the user is responsible for maintaining. I don't suppose 9front has that? Also when I used drawterm (as part of Plan 9 from Userspace on a Mac) the drawterm windows had no anti-aliasing, which I might have been able to get used to, except that the native-Mac windows used anti-aliasing and switching back and forth I found a jarring experience (and I was never able to figure out how to configure the Mac (and my browser) not to do the anti-aliasing). (Technically, my browser was doing its own low-level drawing, but it had been carefully tuned by the maintainers of the browser to visually resemble the results of the native Mac drawing systems.)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - eschneider 3y ago
    As for secure boot, assuming plan9 can boot from a read-only volume, that shouldn't be hard to implement. The (simplified) way it works on most systems is that secure boot is implement in the SOC and that's used to verify the installed bootloader and then the verified bootloader verifies that the boot volume is unmodified (think checksum, but a bit more complicated to make it boot faster. :) There isn't anything about that that couldn't be incorporated into almost any boot process.
    - hollerith 3y ago
      If it isn't hard to implement why does no Linux distro besides bottlerocket (specialized for use on AWS and other cloud services) Android and ChromeOS do it?
      - stonogo 3y ago
        Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, Suse, Arch, Gentoo, and Slackware all support secureboot. After that I got tired of looking up linux distributions, so there are likely more.
        hollerith 3y ago
        Right but none of those verify /usr like Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS and ChromeOS do.
        stonogo 3y ago
        That's not part of secureboot's remit, but distros who do it are generally referred to as 'immutable distros'. Fedora Silverblue, CarbonOS, NixOS, GUIX, Endless OS, and Vanilla OS are a few.
        3y ago

moody__ 3y ago

Indeed, thankfully using a 9front system from another OS is quite nice. My workstation at home is a Linux machine with a drawterm window open fullscreen. You can think of drawterm like our version of windows RDP, with a shared clipboard and a way of sharing files seamlessly between the host and the remote system. Under the hood, drawterm is just an implementation of /dev/draw that gets given to a remote system, so you're not forwarding compressed images but individual draw RPC messages. Over a LAN connection you can even play doom at 1080p.

hollerith 3y ago
What's the security story like for 9front? For years, Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS and ChromeOS has used a verified boot process that prevents any malware from surviving a reboot in any of the system software, i.e., anywhere except for the user's home directory and maybe other directories created by the user that the user is responsible for maintaining. I don't suppose 9front has that? Also when I used drawterm (as part of Plan 9 from Userspace on a Mac) the drawterm windows had no anti-aliasing, which I might have been able to get used to, except that the native-Mac windows used anti-aliasing and switching back and forth I found a jarring experience (and I was never able to figure out how to configure the Mac (and my browser) not to do the anti-aliasing). (Technically, my browser was doing its own low-level drawing, but it had been carefully tuned by the maintainers of the browser to visually resemble the results of the native Mac drawing systems.)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- eschneider 3y ago
  As for secure boot, assuming plan9 can boot from a read-only volume, that shouldn't be hard to implement. The (simplified) way it works on most systems is that secure boot is implement in the SOC and that's used to verify the installed bootloader and then the verified bootloader verifies that the boot volume is unmodified (think checksum, but a bit more complicated to make it boot faster. :) There isn't anything about that that couldn't be incorporated into almost any boot process.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    If it isn't hard to implement why does no Linux distro besides bottlerocket (specialized for use on AWS and other cloud services) Android and ChromeOS do it?
    - stonogo 3y ago
      Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, Suse, Arch, Gentoo, and Slackware all support secureboot. After that I got tired of looking up linux distributions, so there are likely more.
      - hollerith 3y ago
        Right but none of those verify /usr like Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS and ChromeOS do.
        stonogo 3y ago
        That's not part of secureboot's remit, but distros who do it are generally referred to as 'immutable distros'. Fedora Silverblue, CarbonOS, NixOS, GUIX, Endless OS, and Vanilla OS are a few.
        3y ago