I have a mild (but as yet unfulfilled) interest in Plan 9. Since I’m no expert on the subject, there are only a few things that come to mind:
- It was made by the same crowd that made Unix.
- “Everything is a file” probably makes certain things easier for manipulating windows or other things you don't typically do via pipes on Unix
- I find SSH really useful. Plan 9 folks don’t, because apparently their ability to mount remote filesystems is even more convenient. I find this intriguing.
- The userland tools are lightweight, with few flags.
I’ve tried to install Plan 9 twice. The first time (several years ago), it didn’t work on my cheap office Dell. The second time (last year), I couldn’t understand the installation instructions. Maybe sometime I’ll try to install it again sometime, but in the meantime I’ll stick with
p9p.