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Plan 9
Plan 9 (from Bell Labs, reference to the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space) is a research operating system, now "FOSS", that was started by many of the original Unix developers as the next project of the same kind, to carry on the spirit and create a "new and updated Unix". The project starts with Unix philosophy (minimalist software philosophy) which it subsequently expands, modifies and "updates" to better suit the "new/evolved" computers -- though Plan 9 developers claim the system is "more Unix than Unix itself", the validity of such claim is questionable as Plan 9 brings in a more complicated paradigm of distributed computing, new assumed dependencies (such as requiring GUI and mouse) and therefore bloat (although still being conducted in a very minimal way compared to mainstream operating systems). Besides the original Plan 9, which is apparently dead now, there exist active forks such as 9front; BEWARE, 9front has a COC and is a fascist pseudoleftist project. One famous guy working on Plan 9 is Rob Pike who really went super crazy lately; originally a true Unix hacker he later on started saying things like "I want no local storage on my computer" and "the world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me", which seem to reflect what Plan 9 is about -- some would say evolution, others degeneracy. Plan 9 fans are also obsessed with "scientific papers" about OS development, they won't talk to you if you haven't read all the papers.
On one hand Plan 9 sounds good and its idealism is admirable, nevertheless Plan 9 is SHIT due to the following fact: it requires what isn't necessary, for example GUI, mouse, file system and networking and forces computers and users to be certain way, severely limiting what an OS could otherwise do. This is absolutely unforgivable and violates the basic premise of good, freedom offering, minimalist nondiscriminatory software; in fact it violates the Unix philosophy which it is supposed to be building on top of -- an operating system should do one thing well: that of offering and environment for programs and their resources, user interface is a nontrivial extra task that should be separated. If you ask how to use Plan 9 without a mouse, the fans respond with telling you how stupid you are for not wanting to use mouse ("here is a study that says mice are better than keyboards: checkmate!") and that using mouse is actually what you want (hey bro, everyone's using a mouse, just accept it) -- they try to force a specific way of how computers should be and how they should be operated, just as Microsoft and Apple, without taking into account that computers can (and should be allowed to) be wildly different, very small, with tiny displays (or no displays at all), with no pointing devices (game consoles, voice operated computers, ...) etc. Sure, it may be possible to make the system work without a mouse or GUI, but these concepts form the very basis of the code and its philosophy, they will be carried as a dead weight if you're not using them and you will probably encounter great issues such as many programs simply relying on the existence of GUI and mouse and not working without them. The philosophy is similar to that of "smart" devices which assume that "Internet is everywhere" and so "let's put Internet into everything", even things that don't need any Internet at all (like hammers and teaspoons), and by the way they will no longer work without Internet (let's hope it doesn't go down lol). In this way Plan 9 is a dictatorship and we don't approve of it.
{ To plan 9 fans: please let me know if I misunderstand the concepts somehow, but this is how I understand the system. Beware however that trying to convince me to simply conform with your way of computing will lead nowhere. ~drummyfish }
Plan9's mascot, Glenda, is proprietary (as of february 2023), despite it having been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons lol. No license to be seen on its website.
TODO: some more shite like history and the actual basic concepts?