alt Hacker NewsOn 9 front there's vmx which is hardware virtualization. You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window.
I'd also like to point out that most users of Plan 9 dislike web technology because it's a giant nightmare of code. No one human can even begin to comprehend the code base of Chrome, let alone Firefox - programs that are as big, if not bigger than the kernels they run on. That is an absurd state to be in - your runtime requires a billion dollar company to maintain. Even open source Firefox needs millions in funding.
Whereas a single human can grasp plan 9 code from the kernel to user space. That's the runtime I want, something I can understand. The process is the container on plan 9 so you have everything you need to build distributed apps without a web browser. It's human scale distributed computing. I'd like a future without the "modern" corporate scale web.
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> a single human can grasp plan 9 code from the kernel to user space.
Is that true? I cloned the 2015 release of plan 9 a week or so ago and it had around a million lines of C. Can a single person hold all of that? I sure as hell can’t.
> You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window.
Not only is the VNC redirection unnecessary, so it is the entire filesystem. You could just render the vm directly to the window and boot a read only image. Plus then you don't have to deal with VNC.
Oh yes I absolutely agree. I would definitely like to completely replace the web. It's just that in order to (currently) do my banking, pay my bills, book airline tickets, order from Amazon, etc. I must use a browser. If I could escape all that I would run Plan 9 exclusively without another OS or hacks to access a browser from another OS/virtual machine.