Ay, folks! I'm back from my dry spell of not having anything about which to write.

It's time for the wonders of obscure and esoteric operating systems! Today's instalment is 9front, a fork (and update) of Plan 9 from Bell Labs (the people whom brought us UNIX). Plan 9 was supposed to be the successor to UNIX, but that didn't really happen, thanks to variations of BSD and Linux.

Today, I installed 9front on a VM, just for fun. Well, fun was not had when it came to actually using the system. At first, I couldn't even figure out how to use the text editor (sam). It took me a while to work out that I need to create an empty file and invoke the editor on it. sam is super basic (just a blank panel if you don't supply a filename); it makes nano look complex by comparison! There's also an all-in-one job called acme and it supposedly does everything from one place (including email), but FSM help me, I can't make head nor tail of it. I really wish the system had an editor like nano or, even better, vim.

All I'm trying to do is write and compile hello world in ASCII/ISO C, but it won't even allow me to do that. (The compiler/linker can't find the printf function, despite the source code including stdio.h and stdlib.h.)

Either it's too late at night for this or it's complicated as heck. I know that 9front is built for developers, but honestly, it's too damn hard to use casually, especially without all the GNU+Linux tools I'm used to (including bash as the shell of choice).

It looks like the plan really did fall by the wayside.