Gregory's Server
@p @MischievousTomato @shebang
Well to me the annoying parts of Plan9 (listing the good parts would be too long):
- Lack of things like keyboard accessibility, using Plan9 as a daily driver would probably damage my wrists further, I can still use a mouse fine in most situations just not *that* much
- No multi-monitor support (not that there is good GPU support anyway but I don't care much about that except for efficient video decoding)
And then there is few autisms:
- Move more things out of the kernel, as I think that would make it easier to create and maintain drivers while also getting better stability (haven't ran Plan9 enough to judge that part though)
- Probably write another file storage, hjfs and cwfs have been unreliable in my experience
Meanwhile the annoying parts of most Unix-likes:
- (Linux) I want a base system dammit, but it doesn't means I want a monorepo with vendored tools
- Multi-architecture support *sucks* (specially cross-compiling)
- The kernels are way too monolithic, wtf are things like the filesystems doing in it
- No one has a VT200 on their desk except for retro-nostalgia purposes
- The filesystem hierarchy is still stuck to early-Unix and the mob doesn't knows how to fix it, they just add more symlinks
- They more have to do with the ass-backward stuff from GNU than actual UNIX®
Well to me the annoying parts of Plan9 (listing the good parts would be too long):
- Lack of things like keyboard accessibility, using Plan9 as a daily driver would probably damage my wrists further, I can still use a mouse fine in most situations just not *that* much
- No multi-monitor support (not that there is good GPU support anyway but I don't care much about that except for efficient video decoding)
And then there is few autisms:
- Move more things out of the kernel, as I think that would make it easier to create and maintain drivers while also getting better stability (haven't ran Plan9 enough to judge that part though)
- Probably write another file storage, hjfs and cwfs have been unreliable in my experience
Meanwhile the annoying parts of most Unix-likes:
- (Linux) I want a base system dammit, but it doesn't means I want a monorepo with vendored tools
- Multi-architecture support *sucks* (specially cross-compiling)
- The kernels are way too monolithic, wtf are things like the filesystems doing in it
- No one has a VT200 on their desk except for retro-nostalgia purposes
- The filesystem hierarchy is still stuck to early-Unix and the mob doesn't knows how to fix it, they just add more symlinks
- They more have to do with the ass-backward stuff from GNU than actual UNIX®
> - Lack of things like keyboard accessibility
Yeah, you can tweak this kind of thing; sam is pretty keyboard-friendly out of the box. You can script keyboard events arbitrarily, even, just put a pipe between the keyboard device and rio. I don't because it's not useful but I used to do this kind of thing with Inferno, but I can understand the wrist issues with mice. (Although Thinkpads are nice for this, but lateral stress on my index finger tends to make the joints sore if I use just my laptop for a few days.)
> No multi-monitor support
Don't quote me on this, but I think that's been fixed. I usually use drawterm anyway; there's stuff that lives in Linux that I can't avoid. (Linux is my new Windows.) You can run $n operating systems now that you can get a pile of computers without even having to dumpster-dive and you can run 30 VMs on each of them.
> Move more things out of the kernel, as I think that would make it easier to create and maintain drivers while also getting better stability (haven't ran Plan9 enough to judge that part though)
Yeah, it doesn't work like that; it's trivial to play with drivers, and it's ridiculously stable but it doesn't actually need to be: your files live on the fileserver (which should be stable), you run your stuff on a CPU server and connect to a terminal server and you can reboot basically any of those without consequence, and it's had kexec() since forever (reboot $kernelpath) so as long as you don't write a kernel that crashes the machine and also hoses remote debugging, it's like a few seconds to test a new kernel. So stability's less of an issue, but I've never gotten it to crash by normal means.
But I'm interested in what you want, like analogous to the stuff I was talking about. What do you want your OS to do? Like, one step up from feature bullet points.
> - Lack of things like keyboard accessibility
Yeah, you can tweak this kind of thing; sam is pretty keyboard-friendly out of the box. You can script keyboard events arbitrarily, even, just put a pipe between the keyboard device and rio. I don't because it's not...