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Driving Plan 9
Glenda_lives_on writes "OSnews has an alternative OS review on Plan 9. Plan 9 is a research OS produced by Bell Labs. It was open sourced a few years back, and has enjoyed a revival of sorts. Los Alamos National Labs is continuing to favor Plan 9 for their new generation of super computing because its the fastest thing out there. I have downloaded and ran Plan 9 before. In fact the Plan 9 live cd sits here on my desk. Its not an operating system for noobs however, and lacks some graphical refinement. Plan 9 is a very cool and a interesting test drive however. Its definitely worth the price of admission (free) for exploring, and education."
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---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
I think you mean: if it were simply a matter of having an idea how to build a better OS, OpenBSD would have flattened Linux a long time ago. The big problem with OpenBSD is that they haven't built most of it; it's sorely lacking in (native) features. It doesn't matter how good or bad your kernel is, emacs and firefox are basically the same on every platform. OpenBSD has so few actual (working) pieces that it's not really any different to yet another Linux platform - except for a handful of low-level tools which tend to be less featureful than the corresponding Linux versions.
The other problem is that these ideas often don't work very well in practice (microkernels are slower and can't actually do anything new, openssl has unreadably foul code, etc). Linux took off because, in practice, it's faster and more featureful than anything else that wasn't specifically designed for the task you're currently trying to do. All these other things may do some things better, but inevitably do all the other things worse, and that's what counts.
Congregations on the worst post ever.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs.