I think it really is as simple as our dorks from the Labs liking Ed Wood.

Same reason the mascot is named Glenda.

As in a less mouse-driven way to move around? Or just a straight up different window manager?

For the first, 9front has extras on top of Plan 9 – riow(1) and a /dev/kbdtap device described in rio(4) – to allow for more keyboard-driven workflows. It can make rio into a sort of mouse-driven i3/ratpoison-ish thing... kind of.

I autostart it with rio like this:

riow </dev/kbdtap >/dev/kbdtap |[3] mybar

where mybar is a shell function that prints the status bar at the bottom of the screen. That part is used to intercept mouse clicks and turn them into commands for the audio player, zuke.

No, but it comes with Doom as well as a bunch of other games and emulators. See games(1) and nintendo(1) for details.

Perhaps just PNU?

That would be the port of NetSurf.

On this machine I have everything except for Bluetooth and the fingerprint reader, neither of which I ever use anyway.

I have an RPi4 and a 0W that run 9front as diskless terminals thanks to that effort. It works really well!

Richard Miller is one of the OGs; he did the first port of UNIX, and if you look into Plan 9 more you'll see exactly how much of a connection to history it really is.

Nothing at all.

It's purely for my own needs — what worked for Rob Pike's eyes in the '90s doesn't really work for mine when it comes to actually using it every day, so I figured I'd have fun with it while I was changing the colors for the various programs.

Very much and very actively.

There are new commits every week and the latest release was April 28th.

All? I just use it like any other computer, honestly.

Are there any specific questions you have? I can try my best to explain.

It uses /dev/draw.

See draw(3) and rio(4) for details.

Well now, don't I feel stupid. I never really bother messing with customizing the desktop layout nor do I use Cinnamon regularly, so I somehow must have just glossed right over that option. She only mentioned it one time in passing and had already gotten over it by that point.

Thanks!