9front "This Was Supposed to Be Fun" Released

bbirdculture about 3 hours ago 20 commentsRead Article on 9front.org

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14% Positive

Analyzed from 821 words in the discussion.

Discussion (20 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

lproven•about 1 hour ago

Explanation of the codename, from the artist who did the "cover art" for an earlier version and who works on 9front:

https://analognowhere.com/_/tcrxsm/

Arodex•2 minutes ago

"Stairway to Anschluss"

I see the 9front guys still love flirting with "nazi for laughs and giggles" esthetic...

iberator•about 2 hours ago

What is it? Some hobby operating system or what?

lproven•about 1 hour ago

9front is the community fork of the OS that the creators of UNIX and C did next.

This is what Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson did to fix the faults in the Unix design.

Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and all the other FOSS Unix-like OSes are community recreations of the flawed AT&T Unix.

9front is the continuation of the OS that came next.

MisterTea•about 1 hour ago

Plan 9 is mostly Rob Pikes idea and did not involve Ritchie heavily. https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9

Recently, Pike commented that he designed Plan 9 so he could build the windowing system he wanted. (edit: oops, link) https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T4fec171fec7e3845-M2...

vintagedave•18 minutes ago

So that would be 'rio'?[0] I can find screenshots but haven't found much that explains how or why it's different -- what I've read explains it's not how it looks so much as how it functions, eg, each process genuinely own a console or mouse rather than getting events from the OS as you might in, say, Windows. I can't tell if I am understanding this correctly, of course.

I do know that in Plan9, 'everything is a file' is literally correct. So owning a mouse would mean reading from /path/to/mouse. But what I've also read is that every process can do so believing they own it - it's theirs exclusively?

For anyone reading this comment in future please do not trust it, I don't know what I'm talking about, except that standard references I've found don't fully explain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Graphica...

lproven•39 minutes ago

I knew this about Pike, but not Ritchie. Thanks.

I think, though, that one of the vastly underestimated aspects of Plan 9/9front is its simplified C.

AIUI one of the biggest differences is that a file is not allowed to `#include` anything that has already been #included in a parent project. You are not allowed to nest #includes.

The result is vastly reduced compile times. I have read claims of over 1000x fewer lines of code going through the compiler.

(Sure, disk caching helps a lot, but it still has to go through CPU.)

Cleaning up a codebase is a massive PITA but it's a one-time job and I have read comments that once you learn this, it quickly becomes habit.

Imagine if that was put into C29 as an advisory.

Decades and centuries of compute-time saved.

This is standard in Go, which is of course Pike's more recent baby.

ANSI C let you get away with this, which sounds like one of the more epic mistakes:

https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article#TOC_5.

pram•35 minutes ago

That XTerm readme is pretty funny

"Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here"

wwalexander•about 2 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

> Unofficial development for the system also continues on the 9front fork, where active contributors provide monthly builds and new functionality. So far, the 9front fork has provided the system Wi-Fi drivers, audio drivers, USB support and built-in game emulator, along with other features.

MisterTea•about 1 hour ago

To be fair drivers for all that existed already but support was very very narrow in terms of variety. e.g. there was wifi support for like one or two cards but handled on a per card basis - kinda hacky. 9front now has a clean portable wifi interface that spans all the architectures so the Pi and PC have the same wifi infrastructure despite having different interfaces and chips. Same with PCI, it was refactored to be portable among all supported platforms, e.g. the Pi 4 and PC.

ricardobeat•about 2 hours ago

I like this section included in the release PDF:

    0.1.3 − Is Plan 9 a cult run by scam artists?

    From a newcomer's perspective, it feels like dealing with a cult run by scam artists. It seems someone wants to profit from me by selling books on Amazon, like a multi-level marketing group. People say others here are on a spectrum, but it feels more like psychosis, with a loss of contact with reality. I really feel like I'm being gaslighted. I might seem like a troll, but you don't understand how you appear to others.

ladax72707•about 2 hours ago

lol

BSDobelix•about 2 hours ago

Why not research it yourself instead of asking others? Am I the only one who thinks this is becoming increasingly common?

Cthulhu_•about 2 hours ago

No, this kind of comment and the "I misread it as xyz" / "I thought this was about abc" comments are getting really annoying.

1. Search engines, LLMs and the homepages of these sites are right there

2. Why would you announce your first thoughts to the world instead of actually engage with what was posted in the right context?

drcongo•about 2 hours ago

In defence of parent, I clicked around through several pages and still couldn't work it out. The image on the linked page made me think it was a game.

znpy•about 1 hour ago

> Am I the only one who thinks this is becoming increasingly common?

Yeah, and it’s an awful attitude.

Honest questions are hardly ever an issue.

BSDobelix•22 minutes ago

>Yeah, and it’s an awful attitude.

I had a conversation with some 'educated' people about the war in Ukraine. After about ten minutes, I told them if we please can stop and if we could change the topic.

They were incredibly uneducated, I would even say disinterested in the history as we ~know it.

They saw everything in black and white, with no shades of grey.

Long story short, I told them to please educate themselves on what happened from 2013/14 until today and make their own observations (just so they can sprinkle a little grey to their world view, NOT change it just add some nuances to it).

Their answer? No time, also not that interested.

I was a little bit sad to say at least.

Suzuran•about 2 hours ago

"We" don't research it ourselves because we are increasingly taught that we are either too stupid to conduct our own research or not qualified to understand the results, and we must rely on someone else who represents a position of authority. Preferably politicians/influencers/marketing departments/AI models/etc. which can then direct us to make purchasing decisions of benefit to our masters.

perching_aix•about 1 hour ago

Society is hierarchical, and there are people who are closer to various fires, and thus do have more authoritative insight, than others.

I don't see merit to discounting this, even though cheap deflections to authority do bother me too.