Plan 9 Desktop Guide
This is worse than retrocomputing; it&#x27;s necrocomputing, a pathetic attempt to mate with the corpse of a dead concept operating system. Instead of drawing any interesting lessons from Plan 9 for OS and distributed system design, it&#x27;s an attempt to turn a burned-out wreck into a daily driver, generally by redefining driving as &quot;sitting in a car and making brrr noises&quot;.<p>They are remarkably honest about it: &quot;There is no advanced auto-completion of program names and flags, like hipster zsh and fish users might be accustomed to. But this really isn&#x27;t an issue since Plan 9 has virtually no programs or flags to speak of, as you will discover soon enough.&quot;<p>Those with any kind of spidey sense for going down tech rabbit holes might also notice how front-and-center features for, ummn, connecting&#x2F;emulating computers <i>not</i> running Plan 9 are in this guide.<p>Randomly cutting into the document presents you with a plethora of the usual fetishization of the fact that a nearly useless operating system, window manager, etc. doesn&#x27;t take nearly as many LoC as something that more than a handful of people use, not to mention a giant list of things that you apparently shouldn&#x27;t do, like use files made in Office: &quot;There are a great many office suits (sic) on most operating systems, and other office utilities besides too numerous to count. So many are the choices in fact that it&#x27;s easy to forget that &quot;office&quot; is just a fancy word for working with text.&quot;<p>It seems to close on some daft explication of how everything can be a database and how you don&#x27;t need a real one, presumably after having invested thousands of words on how you don&#x27;t need a spreadsheet, don&#x27;t need a web browser, don&#x27;t need an office suite, etc.<p>I cannot think of anything that captures the spirit of Plan 9 less than attempting to revive a dead, nearly 30 year old operating system and pretend that it&#x27;s a useful daily driver. At the time Plan 9 was built it was a quirky and <i>clean</i> take on technology of the time, built on cutting edge and interesting hardware. At a time when distributed systems in Unix (not really Linux, then) were a tooth-grinding exercise in frozen NFS mounts and awkward, irritating incompatibilities, Plan 9 was a breath of fresh air. Honoring its spirit would be building a new operating system that applies this kind of simplicity to modern hardware (a hell of a task) - and learns from its mistakes, not trying to set up a homestead in this utter wreck.