Yes, and it's helpful to remember why it's a distributed system. Plan 9 was created to support people working together in groups at the project or department level. The Plan 9 creators - the original Unix guys - liked the idea of a time-shared computer, where there is just one system to administer and everyone can easily access all the files and other resources. Then it became feasible to use many computers instead of just one, but they wanted to use them with not much more administrative effort than a single time-shared computer, and no additional barriers to sharing files etc. So in the original Plan 9 installations the computers used as terminals were stateless - you could walk up to any terminal and log in to your own customized environment that mounted just the files systems and other resources you wanted.
Also, they made use of specialized computers - the ones with nice displays were terminals, there were compute servers with powerful CPUs and file servers with big disks. Some computers were quite specialized, like the ones with WORM drives that supported the Venti versioned file system, that provided seamless automatic backups and even a sort of version control.
Now Plan 9 lives on, used (as far as I know) mostly by lone individuals. So now the Plan 9 terminal, file server, and compute server usually all run on the same computer. It works, but it's not the original vision.
I think one of the reasons Linux but not Plan 9 took off, besides licensing, is that this vision of a project-scale distributed system fell out of style. Many of the people who adopted Linux in the 1990s wanted a largely self-contained computer they could run themselves, they didn't want a terminal to connect to a distributed system. The original Plan 9 stateless terminals don't really fit in a world where everyone is carrying around their own laptop.
So now we have a world with a lot of mostly self-contained individual computers, that use cloud services far away run by huge corporations. The intermediate scale organized around projects and small groups isn't explicitly supported by the computer systems themselves. Plan 9 can live on in this world, but it's not the world it was originally designed for.
Also, they made use of specialized computers - the ones with nice displays were terminals, there were compute servers with powerful CPUs and file servers with big disks. Some computers were quite specialized, like the ones with WORM drives that supported the Venti versioned file system, that provided seamless automatic backups and even a sort of version control.
Now Plan 9 lives on, used (as far as I know) mostly by lone individuals. So now the Plan 9 terminal, file server, and compute server usually all run on the same computer. It works, but it's not the original vision.
I think one of the reasons Linux but not Plan 9 took off, besides licensing, is that this vision of a project-scale distributed system fell out of style. Many of the people who adopted Linux in the 1990s wanted a largely self-contained computer they could run themselves, they didn't want a terminal to connect to a distributed system. The original Plan 9 stateless terminals don't really fit in a world where everyone is carrying around their own laptop.
So now we have a world with a lot of mostly self-contained individual computers, that use cloud services far away run by huge corporations. The intermediate scale organized around projects and small groups isn't explicitly supported by the computer systems themselves. Plan 9 can live on in this world, but it's not the world it was originally designed for.