20 November 2024
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While i am writing this the first snow of the season is falling,
and finally something in me starts to "accept" the somewhat forced
pre-christmas mood that is growing here in the company (little snowman
on coworkers desk, a little Sana here, some pine cones there...). Lets
see if the falling snow is an omen for a "real" winter this time...

Yesterday i was talking with a friend about my dabbling into Plan 9 and
how interesting this little OS is in my opinion, we speculated a bit in
which way it would have developed if it had been proper commercialized
and if it had found a decent user base. Well... we came to the conclusion
that there is an OS around which we thought resembles as much of an
end user version of Plan 9 as possible: Chrome OS

I mean, look at it: Practically every Chrome OS device is nothing more
than a somewhat smart terminal using software that is run somewhere
on the net (PWAs) but perfectly integrated in the environment of your
local endpoint. You can (if you stick to PWAs) move from one device to
another and will find all of your programs and data where you left them
just after login.

Yeah, granted, the easy system programming capabilities are missing,
but i am pretty sure that, would have Plan 9 survived in the commercial
game and would it have become the next UNIX, these capabilities would
also have been not available for the normal user in a network.

What would be different in such a commercial, "modern" Plan 9? Well,
i am pretty sure there would not only be ONE big corpo providing this
service, i imagine you would buy a compatible "terminal" and then, after
first boot up be asked if you have already an account somewhere (imagine
it be like the message box you get after installing a nextcloud client),
or if you want to register a new one.

I could even imagine a pretty good interoperability between networks, just
share a folder with someone on Provider A while you yourself are a member
of provider B, just like you would share a folder of your onedrive...

Well, i think this could have been a very interesting alternate version
of yesterdays future, and p perhaps, someday, if 9front gets a more
user friendly GUI and a a bit more traction in the wider audience, perhaps
we will see something like that indeed happen...(at least, one may dream)