It's a fork of Plan 9. Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12617036
I like the idea of moving past Unix, getting rid of the baud rate on your terminal and no longer just emulating a VT1000, new operating paradigms and overall saying no to legacy compatibility in favor of actually moving into the future.
I'm not convinced the mouse is the way to go. They're so limiting; I have a panel of switches in front of me that can do anything I want and it defaults to typewriter all of the time. Meanwhile i use one finger for everything except typing. That's a bit ridiculous.
Currently I'm convinced, a modular microkernel with a plain graphical environment built around keyboard and tiling windows is the way to go. You can get graphical composability with a tiling paradigm. You can't get it any other way IMO.
Behind the scenes, can we get rid of languages-as-APIs and all these convoluted libraries? I think a binary should be self contained besides interfacing with hardware and the operating environment.
A good approach to graphical computing environments is a standardized API for graphical applications that the environment plugs into and renders, rather than the application itself rendering itself graphically. This would enable graphical composability as well, two graphical applications can call each other via their API and interact easily.
Happy to see this getting updated, although it is bittersweet to realize it has a minuscule user base and that the UX will likely never change (the three-button mouse UX simply isn’t a good fit for today’s laptops).
This in the front page's legend made me snicker:
"Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!"
Now, what does that remind me of? :)
Can Acme be made to provide code-completion / Intellisense type features, similar to what Java and C# programmers expect? Can it provide a decent REPL, like iPython?
When Plan9 gets posted to HN, the feelings are complex. I love you guys, I really do, but plan9 might have been passed up on by the segment of the hn audience who'd have loved it most.
Plan9 is a project that does things very differently on purpose. A lot of things don't make sense at first, like the 3 finger mouse paradigm, plumbing, mainframe mentality. What I fear is that the more people from HN are introduced to it from a standpoint of "Hey look at this novelty, it just got a new release" the more people will find it, love it as I did, but then ignoring context, completely hold the community hostage with the curse of popularity to change everything we know and love about it to make it the same OS they left for plan9.
Younger devs with terrible ideas are capable enough now to implement things themselves, and I worry that with the miniscule amount of devwork it would take to make huge waves in the plan9 community, I can only hope that people with very shitty ideas dont jump in and make a splash because it'll be hard for the community to say no.
Plan9 is very unapologetic, has lots of rough edges, and 9 front specifically can ruffle some feathers with regard to content and imagery, like the copy of Mein Kampf being in every copy of the source code, im not saying it meant something, but that was our joke, and new people hated that. It could have been a goosebumps book but it'd meant the same. We're already seeing that being tamped down by those who don't understand the spirit behind it. You'll know I'm right if the only replies to this comment will be on the inflammatory parts, not the revolutionary parts.
So like I said. It's complicated seeing it on HN. On one hand I want the world to know this technology that sadly we left behind and seem hellbent on reinventing. On the other hand, a lot of you guys suck now, and are too capable for the limited amount of forethought you have.
I guess all I'm trying to say is, treat my baby right. I'm trusting you guys to enjoy it like the rest of us did.
Also please take this as gracefully as possible, but a lot of you have the worst ideas... like the absolute worst most misinformed, heart aint even in the right place, no forethought, just terrible ideas. The rest of you are fine. I'll take my downvotes in a to-go box, as usual.
Wasn't sure what this is, so I went to the homepage and noticed it has the line "Only X remote holes in the default install in a heck of a long time" where X changes on every page load.
This page does a horrible job of explaining what it's about.
For those unfamiliar with Monty Python's Flying Circus, "The Golden Age of Ballooning" is the first episode of the fourth and final season, notable for being the first episode without John Cleese.[0]
No idea if 9front is intentionally referring to this.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0650996/