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As someone who worked on Plan 9 for over a decade, it would be incredibly difficult. The first question out of everyone's mouth, even back in the early 2000s: "So can you run [Mozilla/Firefox] on it?" No, we couldn't and that was with a very POSIX-like system; the browser is the killer app today and it's also an operating system all its own, meaning it's one of the hardest things to port. We had enough of a basic browser that you could read HTML pages, but otherwise you're stuck with 'linuxemu' which only worked up to a certain (old) version of Debian because the Linux kernel changed shit. If you decide POSIX is a bad paradigm, you're going to have an even harder time getting a browser running.

Of course, most of the shit we do with junky web apps today could just be presented as a 9P service with maybe a couple shell scripts in front of it, but the junky web apps already exist and are in use.



Anyone have links to the plan9 propaganda pictures? Some of them were hilarious. https://imgur.com/a/Q4aMc

"There is no fork."

Apparently they're from 9front, a fork of plan9: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617036

http://9front.org/img/ is filled with a bunch of random stuff. The diagram of plan9 at http://9front.org/img/fs.png seems useful.

"Plan9 has been forked": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2772718

Note the discussion on rc, plan9's scripting language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2773275

Maybe someone can borrow some ideas for their next OS.

EDIT: Aha: http://9front.org/propaganda/


This is fascinating!


I'll give you a lot of credit for working on Plan9 that long... but yeah, you're correct, a browser port would require a fairly large and well-funded team at this point, on any new OS


I think that this is kind of backwards, yes, a new user OS must run a browser, but this is a much simpler situation than "Must run Win32 software".


Yep. I’m on 9fans, and agree wholeheartedly. Porting a browser would be the _one_ thing to do to be able to run Plan9 as a personal desktop, but it’s a monumental task that will never happen.




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