Slashdot Mirror
Sun's Linux Killer Examined
gnaremooz is one of several users to mention Thomas Greene's look at Sun's supposed 'Linux Killer'. From the article: "If Sun gets very serious about Solaris 10 on x86 and the Open Solaris project that it hopes will nourish it, Linux vendors had better get very worried. That's because, in the many areas where Linux is miles ahead of Solaris, Sun stands a good chance of catching up quickly if it has the will, whereas in the many areas where Solaris is miles ahead, the Linux community will be hard pressed to narrow the gap." However, he goes on to describe many more difficulties with an install of Solaris than I seem to remember having with just about any recent Linux install.
Unix has been around since Linus Torvalds was in short pants.
Yeah, and Solaris x86 has been around since 1992. Hasn't killed Linux yet.
Sure you can, you just can't do it through strangulation like SCO is trying.
Sun could kill Linux with starvation. If Sun could promote Solaris in a way that Geeks would start a mass sendoff from Linux to Solaris, then Linux would simply run out of developers, and thus, die.
Only, that will never happen. Where Sun is the only company behind Solaris, Linux has hundreds of companies supporting it; Redhat, IBM, and Novell being the big contributors.
If Sun decided to open Solaris about 5 or 6 years ago they would have had a chance. Now they've virtually assured that Solaris will die from the same starvation as above (Sun won't pay anyone to work on their platform if they can get people out of the company to do it for free, now would they?).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Linux is to Solaris/sparc what the Mac platform is to the Intel platform. (At least before the whole Intel/Apple deal)
You have Solaris/sparc which is rock-solid on its Sparc platform, with integration using the OpenBoot PROM to 100% compatibility with its Sun arrays, Sun NICs, Sun hard drives, Sun video cards (rebadged, but still labeled as Sun)
Then you have Linux doesn't have a specific hardware platform so it is made to be as compatible as possible, and while a lot of hardware is known to work great with Linux, the QA team at Sun who is able to directly interact with Brocade, QLogic, and other vendors to address one-off issues provides a value-add that CIOs like which Linux does not offer, yet.
We're about to see a major war between three very large computing firms: Microsoft with Windows and .NET, Sun with Solaris and Java, and Apple with Mac OS X and Cocoa.
.NET and the marketshare of Windows.
Frankly, I think this desktop/workstation market conflict will make the UNIX Wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s look petty in comparison. In one corner there's Apple, offering extreme multimedia and usability via Mac OS X and Cocoa. Then there's Sun, with the extreme stability of Solaris and Java. And finally Microsoft, with
It isn't just a battle over which operating system is better. It also involves three competing development environments involving three separate (yet similar in many ways) languages. I'd like to consider it more of a Systems Stack war. The vendors are competing on their ability to provide a coherent operating system/programming platform composition.
I believe we will really see things heating up in the near future as each system attempts to draw the best features from the other. Windows will obtain the stability and security of Solaris; Mac OS X will obtain the enterprise connectivity of Solaris; Solaris will obtain the multimedia mastery of Mac OS X. We're living in very interesting times, folks!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"but I can say that Linux VServers beats the hell out of FreeBSD jails"
;-) but I was wondering if you could give a bit more insights on why that is, I have only minimal knowledge of both jail system but on what I read I think the concept is the same, what am I missing?
Of course you can say that
IBM did it in a very half-assed sort of way with OS/2. First of all, they never marketed OS/2 properly. Unlike IBM, Sun is actually making some noise about x86 Solaris. Articles and reviews are being written. People are hearing about it, and trying it out. Its market share is growing, even if somewhat slowly at this time.
Also, IBM ended up wasting far too many resources on the OS/2 PPC port. Insiders have described it as one of the main reasons why OS/2 failed. Had the resources been put towards improving OS/2 and its hardware support, perhaps the majority of PC users today would be using OS/2 rather than XP or some other version of Windows.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
They claim this to be a Linux-killer, yet they go on to list almost a whole page of installation woes, including trying two different third-party drivers just to get the NIC (an unpopular but "hardly exotic" Linksys piece) to work! Fucking hell, give this guy a Knoppix or Ubuntu disc and he'll shit himself. Linux users haven't often had to struggle like this in years.
/etc that you will have to edit, and even create, to get your NIC to work, once you've got it installed and recognized. If you're comfortable with ifconfig, you'll want to use it. Personally, I find ifconfig to be clunky, and prefer to do the setup manually." I can tell you one thing--it ain't fucking ready!!!!!
Note to the author: if you write a review that says "There are a number of configuration files in
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Meanwhile, Linux has been around since 1991, and it still isn't ready for the desktop.
It's close enough, and I'm formerly a member of the "not ready for the desktop" camp.
I installed Ubuntu on a laptop last weekend. It configured everything automatically except the sound, which I had to tweak some config files for (no worse than when I've had sound problems in Windows).
The only reason I had to do cliched Linux stuff like recompiling the kernel was to get my Orinoco card working in monitor mode. Desktop users don't care about that, only people who want to run WiFi hacking utilities.
Keeping the system up to date is actually easier than Windows, since I can run a single apt-get and upgrade everything (OS components + apps) to the current version.
There are definitely some gaps in terms of things like no Photoshop on Linux, but the OS itself is fine for desktop use now IMO.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The primary difference between Solaris and Linux is that Solaris implements fewer features, but they do all of them at 100%. Linux implements many more features, but very few of them are over 80% finished. Don't get me started on Linux' NFS...
If that were true we wouldn't have MS Windows on 90%+ of the desktops. Windows XP/2003 is vastly improved over the original Windows product line but other products such as OS/2 were technologically superior at the time but didn't make it. A few products and companies with great technology and poor execution come to mind.
BeOS
Cray
Silicon Graphics
Next DEC Alpha Chip (DEC)
Bell Labs (in more recent years)
Xerox PARC
Borland (Delphi, C++ Builder, OWL)
Just because SUN has great technology doesn't mean they will be successful with it. Unfortunately, the market place not purely driven by technology. And, a market place moves slowly and builds up momentum. Linux fought and clawed its way into the UNIX data centers. People forget the "Linux is only good enough to run a print server" comments we heard just a few years ago. Oracle is the next open source target IMHO. High prices, arrogant licensing, huge savings going Open source. Just like UNIX. Once comments like "mySQL is only good enough for a reporting application" are gone and the perception changes Oracle will be just like SUN. A company with great technology and no market.
Sun doesn't have to kill Linux. It has to out-sell commercial Linux providers, such as Red Hat.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
- Solaris 10 and Open Solaris (which you build and install on Solaris Express) are both very nice, Linux-like operating systems.
Linux is no longer "Unix-like", people. It's Unix that is "Linux-like".Many/most Linux devices are not x86-based servers and desktops. They're embedded devices like Wifi routers, phones and set top boxes. These are very seldom x86-based, so unless we see Solaris for ARM, MIPS, PowerPC etc then Linux is far from dead.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I expect hardware vendors to tell me how the device works so I can write and maintain my own free software drivers or hire someone to write them for me. I'm not against hiring the hardware manufacturer to do the job, but I don't want to be pushed into a monopoly for support. I think the OpenBSD hackers are of the same mindset, given their requests to Adaptec and other vendors for technical specifications, not code. Having others write proprietary software for you just puts you in the position of begging the proprietor for updates and leaves you vulnerable to being left behind (precisely what you spelled out).
Software freedom is not an argument for more "choice", although if one has free software one certainly has choices on how to improve a program. Choice is actually a poor surrogate for software freedom because it's so easy to railroad someone out of their freedom and supply choices at the same time. Consider web browsers; at one time, the most popular web browsers were Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Opera. There are three choices right there (one more than one needs to have a choice), and yet all are proprietary. Thus, with these browsers, software freedom is unavailable and one is relegated to choosing their master.
Digital Citizen
...is silly because one is shipping on production enterprise class systems and the other is experimental.
Hey it works for the Microsoft marketing department!
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Redhat can just distribute and support Red-hat Solaris as well as Linux, if Solaris looks like being better to some segment of their customers.
> Practically every poll shows KDE has far more users[...]
I thought I'd do a quick test of this. I went to Google, and put in Gnome vs. KDE Poll. The first result was this poll.
I also found This Poll.
And then there's a recent OSNews Poll.
Two of these three showed Gnome winning.
Yes, I know this is not scientific, and doesn't prove that one desktop is better than the other, it's just the result of some random Googling.
But, I do think it is clear that there is NOT a clear winner in the Linux Desktop space right now, therefore the statement that "obviously most prefer KDE" is false.
Throw the bums out!
For the most part we're a small set of APIs published via IEEE with the premise that apps written to us are portable. Unfortunately, Linus felt that supporting POSIX meant more work for the kernel.
The POSIX API set isn't huge. It has nothing to do with money. It has everything to do with kernel architecture. And Linus wouldn't budge.
The result is that we don't know what APIs work or not until we try port our application and find out this or that doesn't work because Linux stubs a lot of POSIX APIs so code still compiles... and now its a game to find out what is or is not implemented in our current kernel.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher