Comment by MisterTea

Comment by MisterTea 2 days ago

9 replies

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On 9 front there's vmx which is hardware virtualization. You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window.

I'd also like to point out that most users of Plan 9 dislike web technology because it's a giant nightmare of code. No one human can even begin to comprehend the code base of Chrome, let alone Firefox - programs that are as big, if not bigger than the kernels they run on. That is an absurd state to be in - your runtime requires a billion dollar company to maintain. Even open source Firefox needs millions in funding.

Whereas a single human can grasp plan 9 code from the kernel to user space. That's the runtime I want, something I can understand. The process is the container on plan 9 so you have everything you need to build distributed apps without a web browser. It's human scale distributed computing. I'd like a future without the "modern" corporate scale web.

pbohun 2 days ago

Oh yes I absolutely agree. I would definitely like to completely replace the web. It's just that in order to (currently) do my banking, pay my bills, book airline tickets, order from Amazon, etc. I must use a browser. If I could escape all that I would run Plan 9 exclusively without another OS or hacks to access a browser from another OS/virtual machine.

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  • MisterTea 2 days ago

    Totally get it. Vmx on 9front with a Linux or BSD VM is the way to go if you want to try to go 100% 9. If you like you can experiment with this on a used laptop with supported hardware, thinkpad best. It's not lightning fast at the moment (patches welcome) but it works well enough.

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    • facile3232 2 days ago

      > If you like you can experiment with this on a used laptop with supported hardware, thinkpad best.

      I would avoid laptops altogether, honestly. Not a great fit.

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  • pjmlp a day ago

    Even though most of the UIs I work on nowadays are Web based, I miss the native apps with Internet protocols, and most of my side projects are native apps, nothing to do with Web.

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naikrovek a day ago

> a single human can grasp plan 9 code from the kernel to user space.

Is that true? I cloned the 2015 release of plan 9 a week or so ago and it had around a million lines of C. Can a single person hold all of that? I sure as hell can’t.

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  • MisterTea 20 hours ago

    You can, just not all at once.

    And which plan 9 release and when? Ghostscript and Python were originally distributed with 9front which are both HUGE compared to the rest of the system. Remove those and its much, much smaller. Unsure if ghostscript was included in vanilla 9 from the labs. Python was included in 9front because it was necessary for mercurial. Once git9 arrived python was nuked from base and removed many lines of code. Ghostscript is next to go from base once pdffs is running (patches welcome.)

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facile3232 2 days ago

> You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window.

Not only is the VNC redirection unnecessary, so it is the entire filesystem. You could just render the vm directly to the window and boot a read only image. Plus then you don't have to deal with VNC.

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