I talk to friends on irc and activitypub, read stuff on the web, send and receive email, play music, read ebooks, watch movies, etc. Typical computer stuff.

I like it because it's simple and consistent -- I do systems administration for a living, so it's a nice break from the overengineered garbage in other operating systems.

@khm @cienmilojos Seconding this.

I love Plan9 for note-taking, programming, music playback, etc. I use it to store recipes, todo lists, my digital 'notebook' (experiment logs for e.g. cooking, electronics projects, strategy games, run times and speeds); I use it to listen to CDs on the train, watch the occasional youtube video, go over my emails, read some comics (e.g. SMBC, questionable content), ...

just because it's not quite a traditional desktop doesn't stop it from being a general-purpose computing OS :P

@pixx @khm finally a flippity flopping lingo I can understand. 😂

@pixx @khm @cienmilojos how do you watch YouTube from Plan 9? As someone who’s spent dozens of hours running 9front (I’m working on a 9P server) I can’t imagine how other than via emulation?

@jpf @khm @cienmilojos Natively!

@sigrid wrote treason, a video player which can handle h264 (on my thinkpad T420s, it can just barely handle 720p 60FPS videos if and only if multithreading is enabled)

combine with a tool that can grab videos based on the URL (sigrid also wrote nvi, which grabs videos using an invidious instance) and you have everything needed

http://wiki.9front.org/youtube

% nvi -a /tmp/audio -v /tmp/video ybGOT4d2Hs8 && treason -a /tmp/audio /tmp/video && rm /tmp/audio /tmp/video

plus https://fuyt.lab8.cz/ to search youtube from mothra!

CC: @jpf @cienmilojos @sigrid

@cienmilojos @khm Point is, copmuters are nonsense machines these days and I want no part of it.

I like SteamOS. It does a good job of hiding the nonsense and just being for games.

For actually working on projects, though?

I'll be honest, there's linux software I miss on 9 sometimes, which I found very useful when it worked.

The difference is, when something on 9 doesn't work, I can fix it in, usually, minutes. It took around two hours to fix the first file system crash I ran into.

If I ever run into a file system bug on Linux, I'd be reformatting the drive and abandoning all of the data.

Where Linux is a beautiful, sprawling, structurally unsound, mansion, with traps hidden at random, amazing towers with no stability waiting to fall at any moment, infested with termites, but with a truly gorgeous landscape, Plan 9 is a small, well-built house in the woods with all of the essentials for survival.

@cienmilojos @khm Heck, I do my accounting using plain text files and some simple shell scripts.

because it took less time to write and maintain those than it would have to figure out how to use the GUIs. That's not an exaggeration; I spent literal hours trying to figure a few of the Linux options out at one point and decided it was a waste of time.

maybe that means I'm too stupid to use those tools, but I honestly doubt that.

@pixx @khm no, you have a point, modern operating systems do contain a lot of unnecessary glitter. Simple is always better. I did a little reading and the file system is neat, everything is truly a file. Seems like there is heavy reliance on the mouse for navigation and window management.

the mouse objections are common. it's because other interfaces don't make very good use of the mouse. rio does a better job there.

CC: @pixx

@khm @cienmilojos Yeah, but tbh, needing two separate input devices for everything is still tedious.

I'd prefer keyboard-only anyways - but that preference is not strong enough for me to have done any patches for it yet :P

I solved that problem decades ago by using a trackpoint.

CC: @cienmilojos

@khm @cienmilojos Yeah, I'll note that it's actually _more_ of an issue on PC for me.

The Reform and thinkpad, not an issue.

pinebook pro is the worst of all, lol

@pixx @khm @cienmilojos this thread makes me want to set up 9front on an imx8mq reform as a hobby

@mntmn @pixx @khm @cienmilojos i recently did that on an old and t/rusty R60, even managed to connect it to the web through the ethernet and mount its FS to my other unix pc with 9mount to transfer screenshots of rio

but using it daily is still beyond me, mothra can't browse fedi and there's exactly one gemini client that i still couldn't build

mothra works with snac2, but julienxx wrote an api client you can try the next time you feel like messing with 9front!

CC: @cienmilojos @mntmn @pixx