They run 9front, much better than XP and 7. No reinstalls, no DLL hells, everything it's statically compiled, updates can be done totally in place and offline.
Good luck running Windows 7 on an RPI and with a laughable power draw.
Oh, and don't even compare VS + MSDN documentations (huge GB's wasted) vs what Acme can do and just the plan9's 9.intro.pdf book. The disk usage would wear out any SD in days.
9front, otoh, can even selfcompile itself in a breeze. Try that under Windows.
The thing is, while it might mandate efficiency, what they made was an un optimized 8 bit VM synthesizing 16bit arithmetic running on 64 bit hardware. It's not efficient at all, it's just that the constraints they gave themselves leaves enormous amount of power on the table.
you will probably be interested in the efficiency measurements i made in the thread linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132868. the standard sdl uxn implementation is less inefficient for things like text editing than you'd expect from the facts you mention, and i suspect uxn11 may actually be pretty decent
SDL2 has been built as a fast whole/partial screen refreshing platform for textures/images, no wonder if it's that slow mimicking XFT/Cairo's job on fonts/text. Just look at the Emacs editor for Common Lisp vs the SDL build of Lem.
Not just that. For any non-JS web, they can compile and share netsurf offline from 9front and happily post at HN or read lots of sites such as http://68k.news and https://midnight.pub
And, with a Gemini client for 9front (there are a few), between the gemini 'capsules' (sites and blogs) and gemini://gemi.dev (web decrafying proxy to gemini, where you can read news stripping out the 95% of the pages, scripts, trackers and all the bullshit, they can get totally covered.
Gopher9 (Gopher client) makes a good point with gopher://magical.fish for global news, translation services and such. Much less bandwidth spent than the web, for sure.
With a bare irc client (again, literally few lines of shell scripting under 9front due how's designed) they can connect to the public IRC servers from bitlbee.org and connect to modern disservices such as Discord and Slack, at least being able to chat against their peers.
Good luck running Windows 7 on an RPI and with a laughable power draw.
Oh, and don't even compare VS + MSDN documentations (huge GB's wasted) vs what Acme can do and just the plan9's 9.intro.pdf book. The disk usage would wear out any SD in days. 9front, otoh, can even selfcompile itself in a breeze. Try that under Windows.