You are correct and this can be seen in some of the old AT&T demos from the '80s floating around on YouTube. There is even a chart that specifically labels a directory like /usr/bwk as the user's home.
Plan 9 also uses this old convention; users live under /usr and there is no /home.
Plan 9 is still actively developed in the form of 9front; updates and new features trickle down to 9legacy from there.
The "original" Plan 9—meaning stock 4th Edition—is more of a museum piece at this point, though, yes.
I can say that, at least in the Southwestern US, our local Kroger stores all use Linux of some variety at their self-checkouts. I've seen the same as above: mostly CentOS and Rocky.
Sure, basically any Debian-based distro should have gdebi in its repos.
It used to be that everyone in the Boot Camp got their own VM that was wiped each season, but recently everything was migrated to a single installation that doesn't reset and everyone uses.
In short: now you get a permanent account.
And yes, SDF itself is NetBSD-based—the largest single installation as well as a primary testing environment, if I'm not mistaken.
Python 2.5.1 was distributed as part of 9front back when it used hg, but it was ultimately removed from the base system once we switched over to git9. 9legacy still packages binaries, however; they're up to 2.7.6 for Python and 2.9.2 for Mercurial.
I never bother with venti/fossil, honestly. I'm more of a cwfs kind of person, but Ori's gefs has been attracting my attention lately.
If you ever want to just poke around a Plan 9 system, SDF Public Access UNIX System offers an ongoing Plan 9 Boot Camp.
Stop by and join us in com sometime!
Additionally, for those that may want a Plan 9 that's being actively developed and will actually work on modern hardware:
There's also 9legacy, which is basically "classic" Plan 9 with some patches from 9front.
mail(1)ornedmail(1)is all I really need.I prefer
mutt/neomutt, but Thunderbird comes by default in basically every desktop-oriented distro I regularly interact with, so I end up using that most often on *nix. K-9 if I want it on my phone.My true love is the combination of
acme(1)andfaces(1), but that doesn't do encryption/PGP stuff.