Plan 9 was interesting for me because I was just at the point of deciding "maybe everything being a file is a mistake". Then I learned about plan 9 and it blew my mind. Really a very neat system.

It's not the most complete lens, but I've always also thought of it as "lots of servers advertising services through a centralized directory" (e.g. like NT's Object Manager).

But, I don't think the Plan 9 team ever figured out how to elegantly implement security/isolation-related primitives like secret storage with a single general mechanism. Their "canonical" way of providing secure authentication relies on a few ad-hoc capability mechanisms, built on top of 9P deeply integrated with some special-purpose kernel features. [1] If Bell Labs had more time, I think they would've ended up rethinking 9P around this issue.

[1] https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2013/readings/plan9auth.pdf

I’ve been playing with it on an old laptop. It took me a bit to “get it”, but once the “everything exposes filesystems” thing clicked in my brain, I grew to really like it. I would love to try daily driving 9Front but the lack of a modern browser and video acceleration is a pretty hard blocker.

I still would like to make a server with it though. Maybe that would be a good weekend project.