<\/a><\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n \t\t There are hundreds of active Linux distros currently and many more under development. Why are there so many distributions and do we need all of them?<\/p>\n This did not feel like \u201cold Linux\u201d or Unix<\/p>\n I started not with Plan 9, but with its maintained fork, 9front. That\u2019s because Plan 9 doesn\u2019t run on hardware even considered old by today\u2019s standards, and I didn\u2019t have any old AMD 775 motherboards with PS\/2 ports<\/a> lying around the house.<\/p>\n I downloaded the AMD64 ISO from the 9front site and quickly learned that even the boot process wouldn\u2019t offer any hand-holding. The first real gotcha was determining which \/dev\/sdDx was the ISO and which was the virtual disk. In my VMware Workstation<\/a> VM, the ISO appeared as:<\/p>\n \/dev\/sdD0<\/p>\n While the virtual disk was:<\/p>\n \/dev\/sdD1<\/p>\n While there\u2019s nothing abnormal about this, the difference was that there was no friendly disk picker with names, sizes, and an obvious place to install Plan 9. It also meant that I needed to boot from sdD0 (The ISO). Then install onto sdD1 VMDK virtual disk<\/a>.<\/p>\n I accepted the boot target and started the OS with:<\/p>\n inst\/start<\/p>\n Unfortunately, I was met with a mouse and keyboard that didn\u2019t work, and after some investigating, I discovered that I needed to edit \/n\/9fat\/plan9.ini and explicitly tell 9front to use ps2intellimouse:<\/p>\n mouse=ps2intellimouse <\/p>\n After that, a lot of the installation was simply an exercise in accepting defaults, though not blindly. The key stages are:<\/p>\n partdisk: partitioning of the virtual hard disk and choosing MBR.<\/p>\n prepdisk: preparing the Plan 9 partition for the installer.<\/p>\n mountdisk: mounting the installation files from the ISO at \/dev\/sdD0\/data.<\/p>\n bootsetup: the point at which the boot setup gets written to the hard drive\u2019s 9fat partition at \/dev\/sdD1\/9fat<\/p>\n There wasn\u2019t anything particularly difficult about this, and the prompts made sense because they were so similar to those found on modern Linux installers.<\/p>\n After the installation was complete, I booted from the disk for the first time and saw the Plan 9 rio desktop. I was expecting some kind of variation of early Unix desktops, but what I got was something completely different.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t quite as alien as something like Temple OS<\/a>, but it was still strange. Windows had to be drawn into existence via a three-button mouse setup. There was no friendly app menu, and parts of the live system appeared as files.<\/p>\n Plan 9\u2019s Acme editor is not VIM or Notepad, as it treats text as if it were the interface<\/p>\n Words could save files, open paths, and run commands<\/p>\n At first, Acme looks like a typical text editor. It looks plain, but then I understood after accidentally typing in the wrong area that there\u2019s no separate text, menus, or commands. Across the top of the window is a row of words such as New, Cut, Paste, Snarf, Sort, Xerox, and Delcol. In a normal text editor<\/a>, I would have assumed these were buttons. In Acme, they\u2019re closer to \u201cexecutable text.\u201d<\/p>\n And that\u2019s precisely what makes Plan 9 so weird. Acme\u2019s taglines are editable text areas that can also serve as command areas. Middle-clicking (three-button mouse, remember) one of the words actually runs it:<\/p>\n New creates a new window.<\/p>\n Snarf is a part of Acme\u2019s copy-and-paste model.<\/p>\n Xerox creates a clone of the active window.<\/p>\n Delcol removes a column.<\/p>\n In file windows, commands like Put and Del are self-explanatory, but become an important part of the workflow.<\/p>\n It gets even stranger because the same idea applies beyond the commands and to virtually any text visible on the screen. A file path becomes something that can be opened. A word can be searched for. The text isn\u2019t just content trapped inside the editor. It can be used to navigate and operate the entire system.<\/p>\n You’ll need a three-button mouse to interact with 9front. Make sure you use a USB mouse and not your trackpad if you’re on a laptop.<\/p>\n Plan 9 took \u201ceverything is a file\u201d very seriously<\/p>\n Unix said it, but Plan 9 built the whole house around it<\/p>\n Unix famously made \u201ceverything a file<\/a>\u201d, but Plan 9 takes the same concept to a whole new level. Plan 9 doesn\u2019t just treat documents and devices as files but also processes, networking, services, and system resources. Often as live interfaces rather than files that sit on a disk.<\/p>\n That became obvious and started making more sense once I listed \/proc:<\/p>\n lc \/proc<\/p>\n Plan 9 treats these as entries that I could browse. When looking inside one process directory, I found that some were read-only views, and others represented a live state that could be edited. Essentially, Bell Labs had decided that files are how programs, devices, and services should communicate, and made that concept almost like its manifesto.<\/p>\n It abandoned the idea of complex APIs and system calls like ioctl in favor of simple read\/write operations for pretty much every system interaction. Looking at the original documents from MIT<\/a>, it seems the original intent was to require all system components to use the same file-based structure. That\u2019s because when everything speaks through files, the same structure can work locally or across a network.<\/p>\n UTF-8 is the least obscure thing Plan 9 gave us<\/p>\n A failed OS helped normalize the text encoding everyone uses<\/p>\n The strangest thing about Plan 9 is that one of its most successful ideas is probably on your screen right now. UTF-8, the text encoding that lets computers handle English, Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese, and so on, without falling apart, was actually created for Plan 9 back in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n UTF-8 works by storing each character as one to four bytes. Plain old ASCII characters<\/a> stay small and highly compatible, while characters outside that range use longer byte sequences:<\/p>\n Character<\/p>\n What it is<\/p>\n UTF-8 bytes<\/p>\n Relevance<\/p>\n A<\/p>\n Basic Latin<\/p>\n 41<\/p>\n Old ASCII still applies<\/p>\n \u00e9<\/p>\n Accented Latin<\/p>\n C3 A9<\/p>\n Allows extra Latin characters to fit too<\/p>\n \u0416<\/p>\n Cyrillic<\/p>\n D0 96<\/p>\n Non-Latin scripts still work cleanly<\/p>\n \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Emoji<\/p>\n F0 9F 99 82<\/p>\n Modern symbols can still fit within the same system<\/p>\n Whereas older systems depended on competing character encodings, UTF-8 gave Plan 9 ASCII compatibility while also making room for the rest of the world. So while Plan 9 never became mainstream, UTF-8 absolutely did. In fact, it became the web standard. Almost every modern webpage, including the one you\u2019re reading now, relies on it.<\/p>\n Plan 9\u2019s ghost still appears in modern systems<\/p>\n The OS lost, but its ideas drive a lot of infrastructure I take for granted<\/p>\n Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS aren\u2019t Plan 9 in disguise, but a lot of Plan 9 ideas survived because they solved real problems that still exist.<\/p>\n The easiest example is 9P, which was Plan 9\u2019s original protocol. If you\u2019ve ever used WSL on Windows<\/a>, P9 is there to ensure Windows can access files in a Linux distro. On Linux, the v9fs filesystem implements 9P support. In QEMU and other virtualization platforms<\/a>, 9P is used to share folders between hosts and guests.<\/p>\n That\u2019s exactly why my 9front VM didn\u2019t feel like a historical dead end. The same ideas implemented in Plan 9 that I had seen in their strangest form keep showing up in familiar places like remote resources, namespaces, and the underlying tech that makes different views of systems possible.<\/p>\n I, of course, wouldn\u2019t recommend it as any kind of replacement for a modern OS. But after booting it up and poking through \/proc and \/net, I totally understand why people still talk about Plan 9. It might have failed as a mainstream OS, but it endures today in so many fundamental ways.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why I wanted to run this strange little piece of computing history for myself.<\/p>\n
\n ![\"many](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/why-so-many-linux-distros.jpg\"\/)
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\n\t\t\tWhy Does Linux Have So Many Distributions? Linux Distros Explained
\n\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n![\"9front](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/9front-9plan-fork-acme-ndb-local.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"9front](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/9front-9plan-fork-lc-proc-1.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"UTF-8](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/powershell-utf-8-raw.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"WSL](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/wsl-windows-server-smb-to-debian-share.png\")
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![\"Asahi](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/m1-lede.jpg\"\/)
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