I've used it as my "main driver" for around 6 months last year and I can assure you it's definitely practical, you can also easily interact with the other OSes with ssh and vnc, that way I could even do some remote video calls from plan9 with the help of another linux computer for instance.

Qemu allows full network access. It's a very porous "sandbox"

Maybe I misunderstood Plan9, but I figured that if remote services aren't speaking 9P then everything would be a bit kludgey. Like, using Acme on local files which you push up to Github seems to be somehow against the spirit of Plan9. I suppose you could just use it like any other Unix-like OS, but what's the point?

I think I'm convincing myself in this thread that it's not for me - but of course I think it's great that others are using it, I don't want to sound too negative.

I think it's more important that services can be exposed as filesystems like webfs or gitfs than that they are exposed as 9P.

There is an image for raspberry pi. I guess that can be a good way to force yourself into it. Just make sure to have vnc access to a linux, mac or windows computer if you need it for work too.