9P is cool, but 9P is not Plan 9. 9P is the Plan 9 filesystem protocol.

Plan 9 lacks emacs, bash, C++, and a full-featured web browser; this alone is enough to make a lot of people post once on the mailing list bitching about it, then never come back. It does have vim now, although its use is not encouraged because we have other editors.

If you come at Plan 9 as though it's "just like Unix", you're going to have a bad time. Expecting to access it via ssh is one part of that--yes, we have an old ssh server, and yes we now have ssh v2 client support, but to access a Plan 9 system you want to use something like drawterm on Linux/Windows/Mac or cpu from another Plan 9 system.

I'm on sdf but have not played with my Plan 9 instance much. If you want to start off experimenting, I'd recommend just firing up VMware or Virtualbox instead. If you decide you want a physical Plan 9 system, well, I've found that it runs pretty well on every Thinkpad I've ever tried.

If you want more info, you can ask here or email me (check my profile).

> Plan 9 lacks emacs

That's a feature: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/emacs

Are there reasons why it would be hard to port Unix software to it? Could something like Cygwin be developed to help make it easier to run Unix-ish software on it?

It comes with a library called APE (see [1]), which provides most POSIX-y things implemented in terms of Plan 9 native API:s. (For example, BSD socket operations are just functions wrapping the normal file reads and writes that you would do in native Plan 9 code.)

Some things do not work, though (permissions models are a bit different, and chroot is entirely unimplemented, for instance).

1: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape

That shouldn't prevent things like scripting languages or web browsers to be ported.

The difficult thing is getting it ported correctly. As several people have shown, it's easy to get Go running. However, getting Go running properly in such a way that you can continue to get updates from upstream is much more difficult. So you end up with ancient versions of gmake, gcc, python, mercurial, Go, etc., all mostly-functional but no longer getting bugfixes, because it's much more difficult to make a nice clean port that can be accepted into the upstream.

Oh, and given that the major web browsers all seem to be written in C++, and we don't have a C++ compiler... that's problematic.

Right. Even X11 got ported at some point, so there is not really a reason why it wouldn't work other than lack of interest.

I'm still rocking Plan9.