I've used Plan 9 a few times in the last handful of years.
Someone got a reasonably good Linux emulator working enough
to run Firefox. What more could you need?
(ok it was fairly limited in some ways, but shoot once you
have a web browser, most of the rest is cake... especially
if it's Chrome, because then you can install Mosh inside it!)
Call me odd, but I like native software — web-apps et al are not my style. Similarly, bastardising everything so Linux binaries run on it kind of defeats the point (at least in my mind). But yeah, I'm odd.
> bastardising everything so Linux binaries run on it kind of defeats the point
Is there all that much of a difference between the kind of "secondary syscall ABI" approaches that allow OSes like Windows and Illumos to virtualize Linux binaries, and autoconf-based porting of those projects so they compile for the target OS, if they only use POSIX facilities that both OSes offer the same way anyway?
I mean, I agree with you when it comes to e.g. programs that use heavy amounts of OS-specific concurrency or IPC primitives. Postgres in WSL on Windows does not have the same concurrency semantics as MSSQL on Windows does, because Postgres is using POSIX concurrency primitives and MSSQL is using NT concurrency primitives.
But if there's a subset of your kernel's syscall ABI, that already has those same semantics, and really can just be 1:1 mapped with maybe a few extra instructions to handle different argument passing conventions—then does porting such a program to the OS really achieve anything?
A common thing to do here is to virtualize 9front, connect back to a VNC window hosting Chrome. It sounds really janky but it's genuinely difficult to tell that you're not inside Chrome -- people have even asked "How in did you port Chrome to Plan 9.
It does, Vim is available through pkg on 9Front and works really well. The only thing I would say is that `:Ex` works a little funky (although generally quite well).
Furthermore there exists "A Posix Emulator" (ape) that is serviceable.
http://9front.org
I've used Plan 9 a few times in the last handful of years.
Someone got a reasonably good Linux emulator working enough to run Firefox. What more could you need? (ok it was fairly limited in some ways, but shoot once you have a web browser, most of the rest is cake... especially if it's Chrome, because then you can install Mosh inside it!)
Not sure if that's practical on Plan 9 right now.