Why do you believe it is impossible to display a web page of text on screen without a 3D graphics accelerator adapter card? Haven't you ever used a computer without a Nvidia in it before? A young kid like you might be surprised to learn that there was a time not so long ago when most computers didn't have 3D accelerator cards, and that they were still more than capable of rendering a page of information and driving their displays.
Sure it is possible to display the page with text, it is matter of what compatibility level one wants to achieve in regards to modern Web platform in pages that might have 3D and media content into them, which includes some forms of CSS styles as well.
Ultimately everything can be done via software rendering as well, depending on how much one is willing to wait.
Johannes Gutenberg produced the primary, and, by far, the most serious, application for type setting 575 years ago, long before the era of the Linux desktop. It's called The Book. Read one some time, and maybe you'll learn what a comma is for.
there's no credible way you can claim that the Bell monopoly was healthy for the economy.
The Bell monopoly invented the transistor. I think there's a credible claim that could be made that the invention of the transistor was healthy for the economy.
Why do you find that so repugnant that it moves you to write resentful comments about it? The entire point of researching and publishing computer operating systems is to discover and share new methods and ideas. I doubt that the Plan 9 authors published dozens of papers and gave countless lectures in order to discourage others in their field from building on their work. They didn't discuss their ftp filesystem multiple times in their publications in the hopes that nobody would ever implement anything like it ever again. That the Hurd authors profitably exchanged ideas with another operating systems group is beneficial to everyone and shouldn't fill you with spite.
Credit / acknowledgement of related work would be nice, and not just because it's the right thing to do. It's good for readers who aren't aware of the related work. It's good for readers who are aware of it (so they can understand the differences, or so they merely know that this author is aware of that author's work). It's also very good for the project's own future maintainers to be aware of similar efforts, especially those that tend to publish what works and what doesn't.
If the world needed OpenBSD programmers to write high-impact replacement software so badly, the world would offer to pay for it. And since evidently no one wants to pay them to do so, it seems pretty reasonable to expect that the unpaid programmers -- volunteering their free time to write programs that they give away to the world for free -- would set their own priorities, address their own needs, and invest their time and effort however they see fit.
It's completely unreasonable. Why would someone want to waste a bunch of their time and money writing word processors and web browsers to win a pointless popularity contest? What would a word processor or web browser on Plan 9 enable you to do that you can't do already on Windows? Mass appeal is not the only way to evaluate the merits of a computer operating system, and Plan 9 isn't going to go to waste because it wasn't the most popular way to watch Youtube videos and write TPS reports.
the model of plan9 lends itself to a radically different way to interact with pretty much everything. For a plan9-esque web browser, each site - nay, each element of a page - could be virtual files in an fs graph, and as you access pages and content you pull down the local graph into regional cache, and other 9P enabled systems see in your visible overlay that cache set.
You end up with a distributed web without needing low level distributed meshnets replacing old IP tech, because 9P on top does all the work.
Or word processing, the working draft is its own virtual file system with some organization, and collaborative editing is just working on the same 9P Mount, and each hostname can identify the editor.
That might be what someone means by "wheres my web browser?" because plan9 is meant to be an experiment - if the successor to the http / html web comes from anywhere, the best replacement (but probably not the most popular) will come out of radical new ideas like what plan9 regularly tries.
Abaco (the web browser shipped with Plan 9) already does what you're suggesting, using webfs and an HTML parsing library.
It might be possible to replace that parsing library with a version of Webkit or Gecko ported to Plan 9 in order to achieve "modern" web standards support while sticking to 9P and such for the actual network portion of web browsing.
This discussion is becoming a little uncivil, but I'll try to stay on-track.
"Nobody will [care] about your [...] operating system if it consistently fails to be useful for day-to-day work."
Nobody except those who already find it useful for their day-to-day work, some of whom have already explained the system's utility to them in this thread. Only if you think popularity is the only way to judge the utility of a computer operating system can you so easily dismiss such a large and influential body of work.
I posed a question earlier which you didn't address, and if you think chasing after mass appeal isn't pointless you should have an answer for: What would a word processor or web browser on Plan 9 (which everyone here seems to agree is cool) enable you to do that you can't already do elsewhere?
You're the only one that thinks anyone is talking about popularity. The fact is that if you had something similar to a word processor (for example) natively on Plan 9, you'd be able to read and write rich text, and still have it be in the idiom of Plan 9, the plumber, chords, tools, etc. and not have to switch over to the other OS.
It's totally possible to have a (for this example) word processor without having to have icons, nested menus, clippy, bloat, or whatever it is that you're objecting to.
I'm not objecting to bloat or Clippies or any of that other stuff. I'm objecting to this frame of mind that people have which laments the lack of web browsers, has no interest or intent to write one themselves, but then wonders why no one has spontaneously written one for them free of charge, and then decides Plan 9 is a waste or non-starter on account of it. I don't mind if someone decides Plan 9 sucks† or isn't right for them, but the logic some people in this thread have used to arrive at that conclusion is unreasonable. There's no money in it, and the marginal utility of a word processor on Plan 9 over a word processor on Windows is evidently negligible enough that no one has taken a personal interest in writing one for themselves.
All of the features fantasized about in this thread you could write yourself if you wanted to and had the time and money. If the person lamenting the lack of a spreadsheet program lacks either the time or money or interest to write it, it shouldn't be much surprise that everyone else lacks them too. It is unreasonable to dismiss a system because no uncommonly charitable programmer has donated their time to write programs that they don't personally need or get paid for. Toilets are valuable enough that people pay plumbers to put them in their houses so they don't have to piss on their mattresses, but apparently no one can think of anything valuable enough about a Plan 9 word processor that they would be willing to do anything that would make it a reality.
Really none of this is specific to Plan 9 or even to computers. Maybe I should have bit my tongue, rolled my eyes, and kept quiet like I normally do.
Plan 9 doesn't seem to have any compelling articulated arguments for any use cases that make it worth looking at beyond mere academic interest.
If we want to look at it from a non-academic standpoint, the lack of these tools makes it unpleasant, and the lack of use cases makes it seem a waste of time to investigate.
The argument of "If you want these features, write them yourself" is not wrong, but it ain't winning any friends either.
A simple thing that the Plan 9 fans could do would be to explain what cases would justify picking it over some other *nix--that alone might be enough to get some of us busier programmers to justify sinking our (small) free time into adding stuff to it.
I guess I didn't explain my popularity contest arguments from earlier very well because since this is where all Plan 9 discussions end up, I took it for granted, but this winning friends and evangelizing stuff is what I was talking about.
Among programmers, Plan 9 is not so obscure. Anyone with an interest in programming something besides a commodity system has stumbled across it or seen it mentioned somewhere. Plan 9 was built to be practical and its authors wrote about its practical advantages at length, so anyone who cares can just go to the web site and read about it. Anyone who wants or has an interest in what Plan 9 offers already has everything they need.
Instead of telling people what they either don't care about or already know, I'd rather spend my own time writing my own programs. Unless someone is waving dollar bills in front of my face, I have no interest in convincing people that they should use a research operating system that doesn't fit their needs so they can write programs for it to fit their needs. Unless I'm getting paid or feeling uncharacteristically generous with my time, I'm not going to take too close an interest with what other people do with their computers.
For a system that is supposed to be so pragmatic and practical, it seems quite odd that there isn't a list of reasons to use it in production or a list of people using it for actual business.
I'm going to call bullshit on Plan 9 as a practical operating system without at least one of those pieces of information.
I know of at least one company (name escapes me) that uses the 9P format for practical communication and file work. I know of nobody (none) using either Inferno or Plan 9 as a system, unless you count a sad effort by /g/ or a few loons on IRC.
It's not simply enough to talk about namespaces, or simplicity of porting things, or the awesomeness of the everything-is-a-file-no-really-we-mean-it-this-time, unless you tie that back into the real world and show how it is a clear improvement over the existing tech.
That nobody has done this, and that nobody cares enough to evangelize it, means that the Plan 9 community will be nothing more than an interesting footnote until it is forgotten entirely.
You were blunt enough the first time. I don't care what you do on your computer. I can continue happily writing programs after you've forgotten about Plan 9. If people stop nagging me to write them a stupid web browser, and I stop nagging people to use my stupid toy operating system, everyone can be happy that way.
Chasing mass appeal has a point because what is popular is not as useful as it could be. I see people adapting themselves to the computer instead of adapting the computer to themselves or to their task. For example, a teenager who crashes the car because his or her eyes and fingers were attending to his or her "smart" phone.
Who said anything about winning a popularity contest? I just want to use a cool OS. Linux hasn't won any desktop popularity contests but it's still possible for average people to use it for day to day work.
>What would a word processor or web browser on Plan 9 enable you to do that you can't do already on Windows?
Do you even know what Plan 9 is? If you did, you wouldn't be asking this question.
Oh, I just read your HN profile. Sorry, I didn't realize I was talking to a troll.
"I'd much rather have seen it built around scheme, [...]"
It's not meant to be built around any language. If there's a language you want to use, just start using it. All you need is access to the system calls. The whole point of making everything a file system is so that you don't have to cram everything together in the same address space. There's no foreign function interfaces or calling conventions you have to deal with if you want to use a new language with the system. It's all reads and writes. Ocaml, Haskell, and ML all have read and write, so if you want to use a less primitive language, there's nothing stopping you.
No one is stopping you from porting whatever you please. All you have to do is sit down and do it. If I had to guess, I'd say that the main barrier you face is that you de-installed it.
