New version of Plan 9 fork 9front released
9front is a fork and continuation of Plan 9 from Bell Labs, which is what the minds behind UNIX and the C programming language went on to do next. It is also rather strange.
The Golden Age of Ballooning is the rather inscrutable name of the latest release from the 9front project. 9front is one of several projects that continues work on the Plan 9 operating system, which was relicensed under the GPL in 2014. Plan 9, or more formally (and nowadays somewhat inaccurately, since it was spun off from Bell Labs last year) Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research operating system.
There are a great many research OSes out there. What's significant about Plan 9 is that it, and its special dialect of the C programming language, are the direct continuation of the original UNIX research project. Plan 9 was in some ways an effort to deliver some of the original promises of UNIX while also bringing it into the 1990s.
9front is probably the most active fork of Plan 9, and improves on the OS in a number of small ways: more drivers, more hardware support, a native x86-64 version, and so on. There's a reasonable potted summary of 9front here, and the project's own FQA [sic] file explains what's new in this release. You might well ask what an FQA is, and don't they mean FAQ? Well, a list of questions isn't much help, even if they are frequently asked; a list of frequent answers is much more use.