I'm not sure if 9front can be a daily driver yet; say, it does not seem to be able to run Emacs. Would be nice though.
Not that I don't like Red Hat. They are the poster child of a successful open-source company, and did and keep doing a ton of great things. I only don't like certain directions of development of certain userspace things which happen to be done under their corporate umbrella. These things, systemd in particular, were quite noticeable on the Linux landscape as of recently, both in the tiny desktop niche, and the huge server sector. Nobody's perfect, you know.
I have to say, that seems like a strange requirement: I have never really considered Emacs (or Lisp) to be particularly Unix-like at all! I think the plan 9 people would probably tell you to ditch Emacs and use acme (Me personally, I say use whatever you want).
Emacs inside is very unixy, under a particular angle. Everything is a list, a ton of small composable functions doing one thing well, one common language that unifies all key interfaces, and the general lack of a predefined final construction, but rather a bucket of Lego blocks around a kernel which does the heavy lifting.
Acme us interesting, but pretty different; its automation is apparently written in the shell language using normal OS commands. AFAICT the Plan 9 shell lacks structured data types comparable to Lisp's: it has lists, but not nested lists, so such constructs are a bit less robust. Also, AFAICT, Acme actively wants mouse operations; I hope reasonable keyboard equivalents exist.
I'll explore more of it in my copious free time (sigh).
Having a lot of small composable functions and a lot of singly linked lists describes most functional programming languages though. I think that's only one part of the traditional Unix design. Though to me it was always seemed like the inspiration goes the opposite way -- it seems like Unix was in some ways designed as a "Lisp-like," where the shell works as a somewhat restricted version of functional programming that only operates on one data type.
Not that I don't like Red Hat. They are the poster child of a successful open-source company, and did and keep doing a ton of great things. I only don't like certain directions of development of certain userspace things which happen to be done under their corporate umbrella. These things, systemd in particular, were quite noticeable on the Linux landscape as of recently, both in the tiny desktop niche, and the huge server sector. Nobody's perfect, you know.