response 248 of 290:

Mar 13 01:54 UTC 2006

I think there's also an X11 wm that's meant to look like rio.

You're right, Dan. X11 DOES suck. And so does UNIX, whatever flavour. The
trouble is, they're SO much better than That Other System in SO many ways,
and Plan 9 is SO little known, that its suckiness is (almost) irrelevant. Now,
if I'm wrong about the window manager thing, then fine. But don't assume I'm
just some ignorant Linux fanboy. I also use (and happen to prefer) FreeBSD
on one machine. I can also see lots of areas where linux went wrong, like
kernel module support. But I suspect that unless you're a kernel programmer
(which I'm not), and/or you have a few machines kicking around that you can
power constantly just to have a distributed OS (which I don't), then Plan 9
really wouldn't look much more attractive to you than Linux/BSD. (As an aside,
imho Plan 9 still doesn't do device management correctly: /dev/dev/ and
/dev/devctrl is certainly an improvement over /dev/dev/ and ioctrl, but the
OS should include facilities for decoding whether what's written to /dev/dev
is a command or data, instead.

As for the bad old days; point taken. But I know that lots of people prefer,
and always have preferred, developing for UNIX rather than Windows, and
developing for Mac OS Classic (especially early versions) sounds like a
nightmare. Let's face it, aside from some shining lights (now sadly mostly
dimmed), programming graphical applications on just about ANY platform in the
eighties must have been the GUI equivalent of batch-mode-only OSES. Did I
mention it sounds painful?