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   pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 23:50:42 JST pistolero

   • pistolero
   • Антон Сычёв
   • m0xEE
   @m0xEE @inyanblood
   
   > AFAIR it doesn't even have hardware video acceleration outside of web browser
   
   There isn't one *in* the browser, because the browser doesn't do anything if you aren't clicking on anything.
   
   > to watch video files you have to de-multiplex them yourself and send audio and video streams to separate devices 😅
   
   This is what every video player does.
   
   > I mean one could probably make a traditional player and access the hardware directly,
   
   See presentation on GPU programming from last year's IWP9; proceedings attached. Interesting stuff going on, because it is a research OS.
   
   Contrast it with the absolute pile of shit that has been heaped onto Linux in the last decade: if you want a vision of the future, it's a YOLD, crushing a human face, forever. It's nice to have an operating system designed for computing instead of one that is forever playing catch-up with the previous version of Windows. I can sit down and hack instead of constantly dodging the most recent "innovations" and "Hey, I've decided to dump a bunch of shit in new and exciting locations because every single package added or changed at least one environment variable" and all of that. If Linux had stuck to what it was good at, we'd have workstations instead of something that usually acts like a workstation if you can find a distro that isn't desperately trying to drag you from Unix towards Kirkland Signature Windows 8. Remember when sound worked on Linux? We had a good run; I don't know why it doesn't work half the time now, I don't know who fucked up.
   
   > And yes, there are lots of people here using it for fun and who have at least tried it once, but @p is probably among the few daily driving it.
   
   Well, when I said people using it, I meant people actually using it. There are at least four people on FSE that use it. There's an instance full of Plan 9 people. I mean, if you pop in and say this kind of thing, it kind of discourages people from learning how it *actually* works. It's very interesting; it's not going to replace Linux, but a helicopter is not a replacement for a family SUV, but there's a lot of really great shit in there that makes it really nice to use.
   
   IWP9 is going on right now, I look forward to watching some of the talks and reading the papers. It'd be cool to be there. The relevant link: http://iwp9.org/ . BLS is a really cool guy, I think I will try to catch his talk instead of hearing someone shit on something cool, if I can convince Youtube to let me see a video.
   10iwp9proceedings.pdf
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     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 23-May-2025 20:38:56 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Антон Сычёв
     • m0xEE
     @m0xEE @inyanblood
     
     > Man, what are you getting so riled up about all of a sudden? My point wasn't how bad everything is, but rather about how different everything is — not only compared to you average GUI player, but even to something like mpv.
     
     Glib, inaccurate, re-answering the questions with "No, @p is wrong about people using it, nobody uses it but him"; I am certain you can see how it looked derisive. Really can't stand for someone to shit on something without a good reason, especially something I like. If that's not the case, sure, apologies.
     
     > but according to the paper, the underlying implementation is done in software, it's just an abstraction layer that can get adopted to work with real hardware.
     
     It's research, not product development.
     
     > And in any case, this is not what people mean by accelerated video
     
     Who said that? You speculated (incorrectly) that Plan 9 hates "direct access to the hardware" and I said "Here's a paper about direct access to the GPU". As far as your television with an embedded set-top box, of course the manufacturer chooses the hardware around the capabilities: whatever they are running on your television is not a replacement for Linux, either, but you use it, don't you?
     
     > but to my knowledge none of this exists in Plan 9.
     
     I said no one's even doing animated gifs: if there's not even a thing that animates gifs, then it's not even a level-of-effort problem, and the problem is that nobody wants to use this operating system to view animations. I don't complain that Linux is bad for video games because that's not why I have Linux machines; it's tedious when people start saying "Oh, but video games". You do not take a helicopter to the store to buy groceries: a helicopter is not for that. A helicopter is not going to be as easy to operate or park or load the groceries onto, and it's going to have much worse fuel efficiency, you need a special license to operate it.
     
     That having been said, there actually is a video player that makes use of hardware video decoding; as I recall, it's a little finicky about what sort of codecs it accepts. I wouldn't know, because I've never even tried to use it. I don't reach for Plan 9 if I want to do that kind of thing. I'd rather talk about the things I *do* use Plan 9 for.
     
     > Using something ≠ daily driving it.
     
     "daily driver" ∉ "set of useful terms"
     
     See, it reads like you keep thinking I didn't say what I meant to say and instead of asking, you just keep making statements: I said what I meant to say. There are people that use it for actual things they are actually doing. You don't think it's accurate, you could ask instead of saying "No, no, @p doesn't actually mean that."
     
     Anyway, "daily driving" is meaningless. What's the threshold? "Most workdays"? How much time do you have to spend using it? Meaningless term. Every single time I say "This thing is useful", I get "buh buh daily driver" and goddamn, I don't "daily drive" my plunger but I'll be really upset if it's not there when I need it, and I'll still own a plunger even if the entire internet complains that the plunger is not useful for eating, because I know what a plunger is used for.
     
     > If they are using it and they are on Fedi, but they aren't using it to interact with Fedi, this means they rely on something else,
     
     http://shithub.us/julienxx/masto9/HEAD/info.html
     
     I don't think anyone using Plan 9 is using it exclusively; if they work somewhere that this is possible, I'd like to know so that I can send along my resume. Most people can't get away with using Linux exclusively, but we don't belabor it, because it's more interesting to discuss what you *can* do with Linux. There is a good reason to use Linux: it's going to be missing some things that Windows and MacOS have, but people are using Linux, and there are reasons for this. I use awk all the goddamn time, and I usually just talk about processing text streams: if every time there were a thread discussing awk, people popped in to say "It's not easy to do games in awk, it's not as fast at math as Fortran is" then it would get old fast. If every time I wanted to talk about awk, I had to re-confirm that awk doesn't provide access to GPU shaders, and I had to repeat it at people that already know that, I'd shut up about awk. But when I talk about awk, I talk about using awk for things awk is designed to do, sometimes things awk *wasn't* designed to do but does really well (I am a fan of hacks), instead of spending my time constantly confirming that it's not good for the things that it's not designed to do.
     
     So I say TempleOS is "interesting" and "fun" and I don't say "It's useful for work". If I talk about Haiku, I say it's lightweight, I say it boots and gets you a shell and a browser really quickly; I don't say it's stable and that wifi drivers don't crash and that I think C++ is a good idea. I definitely don't say "Well, I'm not replacing Linux with TempleOS" (also no accelerated video decoding) every time I mention those operating systems and no one asks me "you can't DAILY DRIVE your TEMPLE OS" because they understand that TempleOS is for recreational hacking on single-user stuff. Someone asks me something about video acceleration in modern browsers, I show a screenshot of mothra and explain that this is not the sort of thing that works well on Plan 9 (but I do really like mothra as a browser; it does a very good job of showing me hypertext documents).
     
     > but tinkering is not the only thing people do with their computers
     
     So? Are any of those people in this thread? "Pfff, discussing 'tinkering' is pointless because people do other things with compters." The entire goddamn internet caters to those people talking about their flappy bird; if I wanted to hear what they have to say, I wouldn't be here, I'd go where those people are. What they are doing with the computer doesn't interest me; hackers doing weird shit with the computer does interest me.
     
     > The opening question clearly was about such a thing and Plan 9 won't replace a mainstream OS here
     
     As indicated in my initial response, I believe: I received a question about accelerated video in current web browsers and I respond by saying that the OS doesn't have either of those things. If everyone is clear on that point, we can proceed past it.
     
     But, you know, Linux is not "mainstream"; anything less popular than Linux is even farther from "mainstream". That's not relevant if we're here in this nerd zone, though. Apply same reasoning to Plan 9.
     
     > Stating that isn't discouraging,
     
     Dragging the conversation back to it once the conversation has moved past it absolutely is. We already know a helicopter has worse fuel efficiency than a car. If we keep GOTO 10ing it then we never get to the good parts and I'm sick of only being able to talk about the meme version of the OS because if I try to explain why it is interesting, why I have enjoyed using it, *invariably* someone will trot out the meme version. It bores me so badly that my head hurts. It must be possible to have a discussion that goes past the most shallow possible treatment of a topic, right?
     stephenson--command.txt
     stephenson--command.wrapped.txt
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     m0xEE (m0xee@nosh0b10.m0xee.net)'s status on Friday, 23-May-2025 20:38:57 JST m0xEE

     in reply to

     • Антон Сычёв
     @p@fsebugoutzone.org
     
     Man, what are you getting so riled up about all of a sudden? My point wasn't how bad everything is, but rather about how different everything is — not only compared to you average GUI player, but even to something like mpv.
     See presentation on GPU programming from last year's IWP9; proceedings attached. Interesting stuff going on, because it is a research OS.
     A filesystem to access shader computing in hardware — that's cool, I can see uses for that, but according to the paper, the underlying implementation is done in software, it's just an abstraction layer that can get adopted to work with real hardware. And in any case, this is not what people mean by accelerated video — modern computers have dedicated hardware for decoding video, it's a hack, but video playback uses very little CPU and it saves battery. Try decoding high-resolution video in software and your fans spin up, yet my passively-cooled TV does this without issues given that codecs it supports are used. In theory you could even utilise it the Plan 9 way — by having a file to access this sort of hardware, piping the video stream to it, and then the result to a file that works with colour spaces videos use, but to my knowledge none of this exists in Plan 9.
     Well, when I said people using it, I meant people actually using it.
     Using something ≠ daily driving it. I can use my old Thinkpad T40 for a lot of things making it useful, but for the rest I need a separate machine. If they are using it and they are on Fedi, but they aren't using it to interact with Fedi, this means they rely on something else, so they are no daily driving it like you do — and that's exactly what I said.
     someone shit on something cool
     🤦 You are wrong about that! I'm not even criticising it, it's still an interesting OS, but tinkering is not the only thing people do with their computers — they also use them for more "consumer" stuff like playing back videos and they expect it to work at least to some extent. The opening question clearly was about such a thing and Plan 9 won't replace a mainstream OS here — it's the same thing you have said yourself. Stating that isn't discouraging, because in this case people won't be approaching it from a wrong angle and they won't get disappointed to never look back. Not everyone is diving right into implementing stuff they need themselves, those who expect their "normal" stuff to work still need a mainstream OS and they might as well check out Plan 9 in a VM — at least the networking would work, they don't run into hardware incompatibilities and see how things are supposed to be, not something broken and unusable.
     
     @inyanblood@suya.place
     
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     Антон Сычёв (inyanblood@suya.place)'s status on Friday, 23-May-2025 22:06:56 JST Антон Сычёв

     in reply to

     • m0xEE

     @p @m0xEE you are the only person I know who likes arguing online and ain’t miserable

     pistolero likes this.
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     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 23-May-2025 22:23:20 JST pistolero

     in reply to

     • Антон Сычёв
     • m0xEE
     @inyanblood @m0xEE Shucks.
     
     Maybe I will become miserable at some point.
     ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: likes this.
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     m0xEE (m0xee@nosh0b10.m0xee.net)'s status on Saturday, 24-May-2025 15:22:27 JST m0xEE

     in reply to

     • Антон Сычёв
     @p@fsebugoutzone.org Yes, I think you did misunderstand me, but I'm afraid that if I attempt to go deeper we might get bogged down in it, so instead I'll try reiterating on my original reply. Not to take it sideways, what follows is exactly what I originally meant, except this time I'll use a more careful wording:
     
     So it's not just my TV, most Intel laptops have hardware video decoding capabilities as part of their integrated GPU and some ARM machines as of their SoC, you can take one from 10 years ago, fire up a modern Linux distro and try playing a video downloaded from YouTube and it would use less than 10% CPU, with software-based decoding the utilisation would be far greater!
     Can you access this hardware in Plan 9 the idiomatic way? No, as far as I know nothing like hwdecfs (in the vein of gpufs) exists! You can still theoretically access that hardware directly and by directly I mean memory mapped I/O (or port-mapped I/O) — the things you can only do in privileged mode, such as ring 0 or real mode for x86, or somewhere in driver space. Does Plan 9 "like" that — no, it doesn't. Because no OS does or most don't even allow it, unless it's something like MenuetOS. Otherwise it's still some level of abstraction built on top of it, on the lowest level neither files, nor filesystems, nor filesystem servers providing them exist — so no, gpufs is not that and neither is VA-API.
     I did not try to make a point opposite of yours, I see your reply as an explanation why hardware video decoding in "modern" browser doesn't make sense in Plan 9 because such a browser itself doesn't exist. However I think that having access to such capabilities would still be useful even if GIFs do not animate. Something you could send an H264-encoded stream to instead of doing it in software would be possible to implement in a Plan9-friendly way, but it simply doesn't exist. Not to my knowledge.
     
     As far as "using" goes… Okay, if daily driving makes no sense to you, let me put it differently. The way I see your point is that a lot of people on Fedi use it to some extent — which is of course true, but very few people of Fedi I know use it as much as you do. Meaning not that the OS is useless, but that you deserve greater credit for it. I can admit that there are people who use Plan 9 even more than you do, sure — there are 9front devs, I just don't interact with such people on Fedi much. But you are a part of that community, you know better. I'm just not sure my point would still be wrong if it is indeed such a small circle.
     
     What I underestimated is that how sensitive this topic is to you — that is perfectly understandable, you like Plan 9 a lot a you probably want more people to get into it. And you use it a lot, me — not much. And you know me, as far as design goes I don't like Linux at all and I jump through my share of hoops to avoid the most over-engineered parts, maybe I just don't go as far as you do. And software-design wise, I like Plan 9 — I just don't have use cases for it, that is why I am more easy-going about it, and so are you when we are discussing other topics.
     
     If something of the above is still wrong, e.g. something like hwdecfs exists and I simply don't know about it — feel free to correct me. Otherwise, I'd like to see myself out of this thread to avoid making it worse. The way I see it, we don't even disagree about the technicalities and I respect your opinion especially when it comes to Plan 9. I sent that reply before going out for a walk that is why I didn't go in-depth and that is why my wording might've been bad — call it shallow if you wish, I just don't want to make Fedi more serious business than it already is.
     
     @inyanblood@suya.place
     
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