Is there anybody out there using Plan 9 as their primary operating system for typical user tasks such as web browsing, word processing etc. I'm shopping for a new operating system for my trailing edge hardware, and my heart and my head cannot agree on how much effort I should devote into adopting Plan 9. I'd like to have an easy life but I am somewhat driven to minimise the "ugliness" that I have to deal with on my systems.
I do most of my computing on low spec laptops and occasionally want to remotely run apps or access files on a higher spec PC. Unfortunately, I find that remote X11 is mostly less than satisfactory on my home ethernet let alone on 802.11b. (To think people once claimed X was satisfactory on 128kbps). Perhaps compression or VNC might improve things. Then of course, there is remote access to other peripherals. Or rather the lack of it. I am old enough to remember RFS the Remote File Sharing Protocol on SVR4 that offered access to remote devices, but I don't have that and I'm not aware of whether there are any distributed file protocols freely available for *nix that do that. Of course, there are clients and servers for most peripherals to allow remote access but one needs to go to some effort to set this up and hope that whatever software one uses can be coaxed into using the appropriate client... I know Plan 9 solves these issues and more, but hardware and software support is lacking. I note there is a Linux user binary emulation and X11 available. Is it sufficient to set up a Linux environment on Plan 9 including all the niceties offered by Linux modern distribution? Does this completely defeat the purpose of using Plan9 in the first place ? If it makes sense, I'd appreciate some guidance in this regard. If not, some suggestions on how to best live with *nix ugliness would be welcome. Thanks, Andrew
