Comment by tombert
13 hours ago
I’ve been on/off playing with 9front on an old laptop. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it, it’s fun to write code for, but i have had a hard time using it as anything but a toy.
I would love to use it as my main desktop, but ultimately (and kind of unsurprisingly), the blocker is the lack of a modern browser and a lack of video acceleration.
I’m sure I could hobble something together with virtualization for the former but I don’t see a fix for video acceleration coming.
Maybe I could install it on a server or something.
I did the same with an old Thinkpad but somehow found it relies too heavily on the mouse. I might still go back to it because I love how far they've taken the "everything is a file" idea and would like to experiment more with that.
I saw on HN in a different Plan 9 thread (though I'm having a bit of trouble finding it), where someone mentioned the idea of using Plan 9 to build a custom router.
I have a very rough mental model of how that could be done, and I think it would be cool to say I have that, but I haven't been bothered to replace my beloved NixOS router yet.