In Praise of Plan 9
Plan 9 is a fascinating time capsule of a period where text terminals were just being replaced with graphics ones.  Which of course Plan 9 had a cleverly designed one for.<p>However if it had become mainstream, it would be just as cluttered up with inelegant stuff as Linux is now, in the endless pursuit of, say, graphics bandwidth performance, first for videos, then for 3D immersive games and now to merely draw your desktop.  Mount an audio device remotely.  Lovely.  But try to get that working with Bluetooth, something mainstream desktop Linux has only just recently managed (i.e. use bluetooth headsets reliably and without fuss).<p>Ditto for 10GB ethernet or what have you.  Elegance is quickly sacrificed at the altar of efficiency and expediency.  At the risk of inciting disagreement, look at what happened to the originally relatively elegant and simple X protocol.