Plan 9

“Plan 9 had such a powerful model for networked systems using these virtual file systems”

“Plan 9 is text first as it was written by Unix programmers who wanted to build an OS and write programs”

“in plan 9 they work fine remotely so I wouldn't say they're objectively bad”

“it's got a lot of nice features that we are still reinventing 30 years later”

“There have been some very nice OSes in the past (e.g. AmigaOS, BeOS, QNX, Plan 9”

“architecturally it is amazing, I just am to bigoted to stay sane on its userland”

“Plan9 solves this entire problem (albeit with its own trade-offs) by unifying all abstractions in the filesystem”

“Yes, and plan 9 solved this; you open /dev/draw and start drawing.”

“For a better implementation of everything being a file, Plan 9 and inferno come pretty close”

“Those problems were solved by Plan 9 (at the cost of dropping xterm compatibility”

“Everything is a file doesn't play well with how GPUs work, especially modern ones.”

“This problem was solved by Plan 9 (roughly 1990) where there was a compose key to turn sequences into Unicode characters.”

“The great thing about Plan 9 is it can make other distributed systems look so complicated.”

“It was too dogmatic. Lowest common denominator meant APIs had to shove square pegs through round holes.”

“takes "everything is a file" to its logical conclusion and does it well”

“It had what was essentially MCP. You make a custom device driver, and anything really can be a file.”

“Plan 9 made some really cool design decisions, and I keep looking for places to use 9P.”

“In Plan 9, everything is exposed as files and every process gets its own namespace.”

“its authors did two other operating systems trying to make UNIX done right”

“Treating GPUs as files isn't something that tends to win performance benchmarks.”

“Then I learned about plan 9 and it blew my mind. Really a very neat system.”

“Plan 9's inherent per-process namespacing has made me angry at the people behind Windows, MacOS, and Linux.”

“Plan 9 is awesome - so long as you understand that it's an experimental OS.”

“Where the elegance starts to fade for me is when you see all the ad hoc syntaxes for specifying what ta connect to and what…”

“the ability to randomly bind on top of your "drivers" to arbitrarily overwrite functionality”

“The benefit is that you can allocate arbitrary computers to compute arbitrary things.”

“the 9front implementation of things usually ends up at about 10% the size of the upstream”

“The full OS also has many other worthwhile features that are not really addressed by FUSE on its own”

“a lot of things end up having really awkward "ctl" files which you write command strings to”

“Plan 9, SEL4, Fuschia, Helios, too many smaller hobby operating systems to count.”

“readers of your comment's replies may find it interesting when looking into Unix/Linux cruft”

“It would be pretty hard to use Plan 9 or Genode/SculptOS with seL4 as a typical desktop OS”

“Research Unix evolved into Plan 9, which puts way more stuff through the filesystem to remove whole types of API.”

“I tried, but I got stuck on trivial things and the barrier to asking for help over 2+2= is high.”

“It's a shame that Plan 9 didn't get traction -- too far ahead of its time I guess.”

“Plan 9 takes the everything is a file concept to its logical conclusion and is much better designed.”

“Plan9 had per-process namespaces in 1995. The namespace for any process could be manipulated to see (or not see) any parts of the machine that…”

“what UNIX authors did after they considered UNIX done, looking at Plan 9 and Inferno”

“Plan9 shed the textual terminal baggage we all carry today, and it did so in 1995.”

“Plan9 had the terminal right. It wasn't really a terminal, it was just a window which had a text prompt by default.”