As in a less mouse-driven way to move around? Or just a straight up different window manager?

For the first, 9front has extras on top of Plan 9 – riow(1) and a /dev/kbdtap device described in rio(4) – to allow for more keyboard-driven workflows. It can make rio into a sort of mouse-driven i3/ratpoison-ish thing… kind of.

I autostart it with rio like this:

riow </dev/kbdtap >/dev/kbdtap |[3] mybar

where mybar is a shell function that prints the status bar at the bottom of the screen. That part is used to intercept mouse clicks and turn them into commands for the audio player, zuke.

No, but it comes with Doom as well as a bunch of other games and emulators. See games(1) and nintendo(1) for details.

I certainly hope so.

In all seriousness, it seems to me that interest in Plan 9 will continue to grow from here, especially with 9front taking the lead and actually moving ahead with real development.

I guess that depends on if you consider doing basically all of my day-to-day computing as doing anything “real”.

I use it for writing, email, programming, browsing, drawing, games… pretty much everything I would do on any other machine. Anything that I can’t do directly in Plan 9 is done by accessing from Plan 9.

• machine: ThinkPad T420

• os: ⑨front

  • auth+cpu+file on encrypted cwfs

• wm: rio + riow

• programs:

  • aux/statusmsg

  • bar

  • clock

  • faces

  • stats

  • zuke

• wallpaper

For those interested in learning more about Plan 9 and trying it out in a public environment: SDF Public Access UNIX System is hosting their seasonal Plan 9 Boot Camp starting June 20th. Feel free to drop into com and say hello!

It sounds like Gentoo is literally exactly what you want.

I am currently not using gentoo, and because the packages in its default repos are only updated when necessary, and the break-my-gentoo repo is more of a joke than an actual replacement for arch.

I’m sorry, but I am genuinely confused here.

Gentoo can be both stable and bleeding edge and allows you to mix and match on a per-package basis.

Does setting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" globally not make things bleeding edge enough for you? Grab *-9999 packages instead.