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OpenSolaris 2008.11 – Year of the Laptop?
Ahmed Kamal writes "Is Linux getting too old for you? Are you interested to see what other systems such as OpenSolaris have to offer? OpenSolaris has some great features, such as ZFS and dtrace, which make it a great server OS — but how do you think it will fare on a laptop? Let's take an initial look at the most recent OpenSolaris 2008.11 pre-release on recentish laptop hardware."
Count me among those who don't care.
It's Open Solaris. It will be a decade before Sun settles with Novell to grant the right to open Solaris, which right Sun previously bought from SCO, who didn't actually own it. In the mean time if you code for this your output's ownership will always be in doubt. It is better to code on a platform where the exegenesis is more certain.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
SCO did not have the right to grant Sun the right to open Solaris. This is a proven legal fact. Novell owns that right, and they have not yet granted it.
Open Solaris is and will be in doubt until Novell endorses it. Until then it's pirate software and no more legal than "Hot XP SP3 Warezz NOKEY" from TPB.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Solaris is certainly not "well-rounded" for desktop tasks, unless all you want to do is office applications (ala OpenOffice or StarOffice) or browse the web. After that it falls down...HARD. Multi-media? Ya..pretty much forget it. These days everything out there is either QuickTime or in a Windows Media format. There's the Helix Player for Real Media formats but the days of Real Media supremacy are LONG gone. Audio? There are some MP3 players out there for Solaris, but they aren't very good and lack a lot of features.
Even the stuff it does do lags behind Windows, Mac and Linux. Acrobat Reader, Firefox, Flash, all lag behind in versions. In fact when it comes to Flash there isn't even a player that handles all Flash content because some point in the past there was Flash and Shockwave-Flash and the Flash player for Solaris offered by Adobe only plays Flash and not Shockwave. So you can hit "Flash" content that is unplayable. The web is becoming more and more media dominated and if Sun (or the Open Solaris community) seriously want Solaris to compete as a desktop environment they need to get off there butts and put some pressure on other companies like Adobe, Mozilla, etc. to get applications developed. I would love to see a QuickTime player for Solaris, but since I've already been waiting 10 years I doubt it will ever happen.
Sun's choice of license is bad. They're basically a closed source company, always was.
Better stick with the GNU bunch. Freedom comes first.
You sir are an IDIOT. I mean that in a nice way.
Speaking as a software developer, Solaris is one of the worst platforms. Solaris issues occupy a far greater amount of my support burden than its share of the customer base.
SUN regularly changes the API in incompatible ways, all the while denying that they do such thing. In almost every new release of Solaris, something breaks because SUN made an "improvement" and intentionally broke the "unimproved" means.
When you point out specific examples, they say "that wasn't documented". When you point out the specific text in the man page that documents it, they say "man pages are internal documentation, you aren't supposed to use those."
I am relatively neutral on the Linux vs *BSD wars. I use and like both. They do the assigned task, and things which worked yesterday still work today and are likely to continue working tomorrow.
I can't say that about Solaris. It's bad enough being SysV (a horror unto itself) but SUN adds that extra special bit to make it a true nightmare.
SUN is dying as a company. The sooner they die and take Solaris with it, the happier I will be.
I started reading the article, and read about 6 words and couldn't keep going...I have the attention span of a goldfish, and it was already looking dry.