Guest post by Jehanne is a new distributed operating system designed for programmers.
The core values that lead the development are simplicity and security. Jehanne is a fork of Harvey (which in turn is a fork of Plan 9 from Bell Labs merged with Nix’s kernel sources) but diverges from the design and conventions of its ancestors whenever they are at odds with its goals. Read about development progress made in 2016.
I don’t follow Plan 9 et al. closely enough to form an opinion on the specifics (or even comment intelligently), but this does look interesting from the description.
Yet another plan9 fork without a reasonable GUI.
If you must integrate a GUI into your operating system… make it a good one that abides by KISS, enables keyboard and mouse usage but does not mix them so much that it is cumbersome (plan9 is guilty here), don’t be different just for the sake of it… and if there are differences make them easy to discover and remember.
Plan9 has some excellent design behind it… which is left in the dust by it’s obtuseness…
Edited 2017-01-11 04:38 UTC
It’s not really about whether there’s a decent GUI, but about whether there are any good applications. Like a modern Web browser. I wish someone was motivated enough to do it.
Even the original Unix team of Bell Labs wizards gave up on Plan 9 because their weird, shitty C dialect made it impossible to port any sort of reasonable web browser or rendering engine.
Are you talking about Plan9 or Inferno and Limbo?
Plan 9, but the Inferno and Limbo teams seem no closer.
Sure, there are no applications… but there is a GUI and while it is well programmed (I’ve read a bit about it and it’s predecessor both pretty cool code wise) … it is a terrible design user friendliness wise…. so I’ll bash it if I like haha!
It is unfortunate that more software doesn’t exist for it… the software that is there at least is well written.
I’m replying to myself here… because I forgot to provide an example of an os that has a different yet discoverable GUI. BeOS/Haiku…. its quite different but not too different, and the differences that are there have been used to good advantage mostly, I’ll admit tracker is more or less archaic and clunky…. but nowhere near as obtuse as plan9.
cb88,
When I tried plan9, I also felt the GUI was a toy, interesting but not that usable. I feel most of plan9’s contributions were lower in the operating system where they took the best of unix but fixed up original design mistakes and inconsistencies. It’s more true to the “everything is a file” concept than unix is.
Toy in the sense that it isn’t much use… on the other hand it does have powerful features. Everything is a file is taken much futher on plan9 as well… even with respect to the GUI.
I wouldn’t call it a toy (since it isn’t so much simplistic or even fun, and it acutally is fairly powerful)… its just extremely unfamiliar to the point of being unusable… kind of like handing someone a Dvorak or Colemak keyboard and expecting them to type much of anything…
Well, I’ve got Dvorak covered despite not having used it in a while. Colemak though… yeah, you got me.
It’s website says that it’s in WIP stage and most of pages are empty.
I’d rather call it pre-alpha (not WIP).
I think, it needs some time.
hm..first time hearing about it..did some digging but from http://hireessaywriter.org doesn’t recommend it simply because it’s pretty new and it may contain lots of errors..what do you think??
The author ported gcc to it, so it should be possible to run some software in theory
I ported GCC to Plan9 years ago and I’m working on it and clang for Harvey.
I’m happy to see Plan 9 being mentioned on OSNews!
In recent days, I discovered that there are a number of new forks of Plan 9, including Jehanne. I updated the relevant section of the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Derivatives_and_…
Whereas I’m glad there’s interest, it looks worryingly like the BSD situation to me: instead of people cooperating on one branch, there is fragmentation and all these separate subprojects.
As Caesar said: divide and conquer.
That I know of, there are now:
Plan 9 from Bell Labs — the original
9atom — x86-32, with PAE support (last update: 2013)
NIX — a fork from around 2011/2012, aimed at multicore and cloud
9front — a set of patches and updates (current)
9legacy — a distro, also current
Akaros — forked OS, multicore/SMP (current)
Harvey OS — forked OS, primarily x86-64 (current)
Jehanne OS — forked OS, 9front + Plan9-9K + Harvey (current)
Are they all really rivals? Is there any prospect of usefully bringing them together?
And what of Inferno, son of Plan 9? It has useful stuff to contribute too — the Limbo language, the Dis VM, its slightly more comprehensible GUI…
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is not under development nor maintained anymore.
NIX is not under development anymore.
Akaros has a closed relationship with Harvey OS project but is not a derivative from Plan 9.
You forgot NxM, abandoned.
I don’t think that different ways would be bad. Bad would be forgetting and loosing ideas and concepts from Plan 9 just because most of people doesn’t like rio.
Every time Plan 9 is mentioned people bitch about the GUI or the lack of a modern web browser. Plan 9 was never intended for you to use on your home computer. It is a distributed environment. It is very good at large computation tasks spread out over multiple machines. It is a really meant for clusters, not your laptop. I think of this when I think of Plan 9:
http://glenda.cat-v.org/gallery/glenda_blue_gene.png
Edited 2017-01-15 16:02 UTC