bubstance

mail(1) or nedmail(1) is all I really need.

I prefer mutt/neomutt, but Thunderbird comes by default in basically every desktop-oriented distro I regularly interact with, so I end up using that most often on *nix. K-9 if I want it on my phone.

My true love is the combination of acme(1) and faces(1), but that doesn’t do encryption/PGP stuff.

You are correct and this can be seen in some of the old AT&T demos from the '80s floating around on YouTube. There is even a chart that specifically labels a directory like /usr/bwk as the user’s home.

Plan 9 also uses this old convention; users live under /usr and there is no /home.

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Plan 9 is still actively developed in the form of 9front; updates and new features trickle down to 9legacy from there.

The “original” Plan 9—meaning stock 4th Edition—is more of a museum piece at this point, though, yes.

I can say that, at least in the Southwestern US, our local Kroger stores all use Linux of some variety at their self-checkouts. I’ve seen the same as above: mostly CentOS and Rocky.

Sure, basically any Debian-based distro should have gdebi in its repos.

It used to be that everyone in the Boot Camp got their own VM that was wiped each season, but recently everything was migrated to a single installation that doesn’t reset and everyone uses.

In short: now you get a permanent account.

And yes, SDF itself is NetBSD-based—the largest single installation as well as a primary testing environment, if I’m not mistaken.

Python 2.5.1 was distributed as part of 9front back when it used hg, but it was ultimately removed from the base system once we switched over to git9. 9legacy still packages binaries, however; they’re up to 2.7.6 for Python and 2.9.2 for Mercurial.

I never bother with venti/fossil, honestly. I’m more of a cwfs kind of person, but Ori’s gefs has been attracting my attention lately.

DECSYSTEM-2065

The front fell off.

DO NOT INSTALL!

If you ever want to just poke around a Plan 9 system, SDF Public Access UNIX System offers an ongoing Plan 9 Boot Camp.

Stop by and join us in com sometime!

Additionally, for those that may want a Plan 9 that’s being actively developed and will actually work on modern hardware:

https://9front.org

There’s also 9legacy, which is basically “classic” Plan 9 with some patches from 9front.

I use it because it’s truly a “complete system” in a way that Linux and even the BSDs are not—every program is an example in itself and it comes with a ton of various scratch-built utilities that you don’t usually find as part of a typical Linux distro. Stuff like a basic torrent or IRC client just sort of fall out of the way Plan 9 is organized and implemented.

It also provides me with a distraction-free environment and a set of tools that I enjoy using, even if some aspects of Plan 9 as, say, a laptop daily driver are inconvenient or awkward. It really is better suited for networked computing.

I was pretty much sold from first contact because Plan 9 is the way that I feel best matches what I’ve always wanted from my machines: a simple grid of networked appliances where I can route the various resources and hardware in whatever way I require.

It is called rio(1) and it comes with Plan 9.

There is a Unix/X11 port that contains most of the Plan 9 userspace—including a version of rio—called plan9port.

It is not nearly as good as using the real thing.

In #cat-v? Not regularly. I mostly hang out in gridchat with a handful of the 9front people.

I already do.

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

Closest thing for bash would be ble.sh.

Well now, don’t I feel stupid. I never really bother messing with customizing the desktop layout nor do I use Cinnamon regularly, so I somehow must have just glossed right over that option. She only mentioned it one time in passing and had already gotten over it by that point.

Thanks!

Firstly, don’t go out of your way to try and convince or force people, but TL;DR – if you have an opportunity and want to give someone a solid start, my recommendation is always Linux Mint.

My mother asked me to switch her in September 2022. Some bad Windows Defender definitions update started triggering warnings every 5 minutes starting at 2AM or something riduculous. I got a frantic call to come over because of “someone hacking her computer” fully expecting to just fix whatever was busted and move on with my day.

After a conversation, I installed LMDE for her and set up automatic updates plus Timeshift. She has had exactly two problems since then:

• she forgets that the scanner isn’t accessed by right-clicking the printer’s tray icon and messing with settings

• she didn’t like that she can’t move desktop icons to wherever she wants

She was also just about the easiest switch there could have been. Like many older folks, her primary use for her desktop is web/email and she has already been using Firefox/Thunderbird since the '00s.