9front "This Was Supposed to Be Fun" Released

76 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by birdculture
(9front.org)

29 Comments

lproven

3 hours ago

Explanation of the codename, from the artist who did the "cover art" for an earlier version and who works on 9front:

https://analognowhere.com/_/tcrxsm/

Arodex

2 hours ago

"Stairway to Anschluss"

I see the 9front guys still love flirting with "nazi for laughs and giggles" esthetic...

andai

an hour ago

Stairway to gulag for you!

nylonstrung

28 minutes ago

A lot of the aesthetic and the "9" in a circle seems inspired by Death in June, who have similar Nazi-adjacent imagery, sans-serif text over reappropriate historical photos and use "6" as an icon similarly

It seems really weird and misplaced for OSS

serf

15 minutes ago

mentally I associate all that stuff with the punk/hardcore/post-punk thing rather than nazis anyway -- but all those groups were known for copying nazi aesthetic in a mocking tone.

pil, 7 seconds, dead kennedies, black flag, husker du, bad religion, bad brains, off, crass -- everyone in the 70s and 80s had a band logo that would've looked just fine on a red arm band.

thinking about it, kinda sucks the nazi got the branding and aesthetic permanently attributed to them , the punks have been employing it for way longer -- and I like them.

BSDobelix

18 minutes ago

>It seems really weird and misplaced for OSS

Or maybe ask Ori Bernstein (the contributor of gefs for 9Front) if he see that too, or maybe you are just an incredible hypocrite.

Hey 9Front! See what your wannabe LGBTQ/Palestine/Wokerism/BLM-flattery does? You get yourself into a Purity Test of insanity, and you can only please those people if you take their exact and most extreme position.

stephenbez

an hour ago

I got “402 PAYMENT REQUESTED”

iberator

4 hours ago

What is it? Some hobby operating system or what?

lproven

3 hours ago

9front is the community fork of the OS that the creators of UNIX and C did next.

This is what Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson did to fix the faults in the Unix design.

Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and all the other FOSS Unix-like OSes are community recreations of the flawed AT&T Unix.

9front is the continuation of the OS that came next.

MisterTea

3 hours ago

Plan 9 is mostly Rob Pikes idea and did not involve Ritchie heavily. https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/1st_edition/designing_plan_9

Recently, Pike commented that he designed Plan 9 so he could build the windowing system he wanted. (edit: oops, link) https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T4fec171fec7e3845-M2...

vintagedave

2 hours ago

So that would be 'rio'?[0] I can find screenshots but haven't found much that explains how or why it's different -- what I've read explains it's not how it looks so much as how it functions, eg, each process genuinely own a console or mouse rather than getting events from the OS as you might in, say, Windows. I can't tell if I am understanding this correctly, of course.

I do know that in Plan9, 'everything is a file' is literally correct. So owning a mouse would mean reading from /path/to/mouse. But what I've also read is that every process can do so believing they own it - it's theirs exclusively?

For anyone reading this comment in future please do not trust it, I don't know what I'm talking about, except that standard references I've found don't fully explain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#Graphica...

lproven

2 hours ago

I knew this about Pike, but not Ritchie. Thanks.

I think, though, that one of the vastly underestimated aspects of Plan 9/9front is its simplified C.

AIUI one of the biggest differences is that a file is not allowed to `#include` anything that has already been #included in a parent project. You are not allowed to nest #includes.

The result is vastly reduced compile times. I have read claims of over 1000x fewer lines of code going through the compiler.

(Sure, disk caching helps a lot, but it still has to go through CPU.)

Cleaning up a codebase is a massive PITA but it's a one-time job and I have read comments that once you learn this, it quickly becomes habit.

Imagine if that was put into C29 as an advisory.

Decades and centuries of compute-time saved.

This is standard in Go, which is of course Pike's more recent baby.

ANSI C let you get away with this, which sounds like one of the more epic mistakes:

https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article#TOC_5.

pram

2 hours ago

That XTerm readme is pretty funny

"Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here"

scoot

2 hours ago

It's a quote from Dante's Inferno

2b3a51

an hour ago

All true, but I can't help pointing out that the code name for this new OS came from Plan Nine from Outer Space, a film (which I gather the gang went to watch and found hilarious, although it appears that the film was mainly shown on TV by the 1980s) by Ed Wood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space

A theme in the film is the waking of the undead, and I'm wondering if this is a message from the original gang.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/PlanNine...

bediger4000

an hour ago

I heard there was some inside joke on the "IX" suffix of UNIX as a Roman numeral, and the 9 in Plan 9.

xelxebar

30 minutes ago

I daily drive 9front.

The historical emergence answers here are fine as far as they go, but they're a bit like saying that Linux is an OS developed by Linus to help him learn x86.

IMO 9front is an exposé of what an OS can look like when it's written for and by hackers with a focus on simplicity. The YouTube channel adventuresin9[0] parades some nice examples of what real world usage looks like.

For example, since everything is just a file, you tunnel traffic with a simple bind mount. Since everything is just text, small regexes suffice to route mouse clicks to UI actions. Since windows are just buffers, grepping history is grepping the window's text buffer; taking a screenshot is just cp-ing the window's draw buffer.

Oh, and 9front C diverges from the standard intentionally in some nice ways: evaluation of function args is sequenced, anonymous unions like

    struct {
      int a;
      union {
        uint i;
        int j;
      };
    }
do what you want, the libc is a lot leaner and cleaner, etc.

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA

wwalexander

4 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

> Unofficial development for the system also continues on the 9front fork, where active contributors provide monthly builds and new functionality. So far, the 9front fork has provided the system Wi-Fi drivers, audio drivers, USB support and built-in game emulator, along with other features.

MisterTea

2 hours ago

To be fair drivers for all that existed already but support was very very narrow in terms of variety. e.g. there was wifi support for like one or two cards but handled on a per card basis - kinda hacky. 9front now has a clean portable wifi interface that spans all the architectures so the Pi and PC have the same wifi infrastructure despite having different interfaces and chips. Same with PCI, it was refactored to be portable among all supported platforms, e.g. the Pi 4 and PC.

ricardobeat

4 hours ago

I like this section included in the release PDF:

    0.1.3 − Is Plan 9 a cult run by scam artists?

    From a newcomer's perspective, it feels like dealing with a cult run by scam artists. It seems someone wants to profit from me by selling books on Amazon, like a multi-level marketing group. People say others here are on a spectrum, but it feels more like psychosis, with a loss of contact with reality. I really feel like I'm being gaslighted. I might seem like a troll, but you don't understand how you appear to others.

BSDobelix

4 hours ago

Why not research it yourself instead of asking others? Am I the only one who thinks this is becoming increasingly common?

Cthulhu_

3 hours ago

No, this kind of comment and the "I misread it as xyz" / "I thought this was about abc" comments are getting really annoying.

1. Search engines, LLMs and the homepages of these sites are right there

2. Why would you announce your first thoughts to the world instead of actually engage with what was posted in the right context?

drcongo

3 hours ago

In defence of parent, I clicked around through several pages and still couldn't work it out. The image on the linked page made me think it was a game.

znpy

2 hours ago

> Am I the only one who thinks this is becoming increasingly common?

Yeah, and it’s an awful attitude.

Honest questions are hardly ever an issue.

BSDobelix

2 hours ago

>Yeah, and it’s an awful attitude.

I had a conversation with some 'educated' people about the war in Ukraine. After about ten minutes, I told them if we please can stop and if we could change the topic.

They were incredibly uneducated, I would even say disinterested in the history as we ~know it.

They saw everything in black and white, with no shades of grey.

Long story short, I told them to please educate themselves on what happened from 2013/14 until today and make their own observations (just so they can sprinkle a little grey to their world view, NOT change it just add some nuances to it).

Their answer? No time, also not that interested.

I was a little bit sad to say at least.

Maybe has something todo with that:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-dynamics/articles...

>>From searching to asking: knowledge and authority in the age of Generative AI

3. Cognitive consequences:

The difference lies in how the information is encountered. Search-based learning requires effort. Users must sift through multiple sources, evaluate relevance, and integrate partial information into a coherent whole. These activities promote deeper cognitive processing.

Suzuran

3 hours ago

"We" don't research it ourselves because we are increasingly taught that we are either too stupid to conduct our own research or not qualified to understand the results, and we must rely on someone else who represents a position of authority. Preferably politicians/influencers/marketing departments/AI models/etc. which can then direct us to make purchasing decisions of benefit to our masters.

perching_aix

3 hours ago

Society is hierarchical, and there are people who are closer to various fires, and thus do have more authoritative insight, than others.

I don't see merit to discounting this, even though cheap deflections to authority do bother me too.

Suzuran

2 hours ago

The problem is not that society is hierarchical, the problem is that position in the hierarchy rarely maps to expertise or trustworthiness. Instead it usually maps to whoever is best at exploiting and then destroying others to raise their position in the hierarchy.

Edit for clarity: The biggest part of the "You're too stupid..." thing I mentioned is that we are being led to believe we can't even determine who is and isn't credible in any given field, so we must solicit claimed authority and then blindly obey whoever shows up first. Sometimes this solicitation is in the form of a post, but increasingly it's an AI-generated "web" search response where the index/training data has been torqued to direct people toward economic outcomes desired by the AI/search engine's owners.