[advocacy-discuss] OpenSolaris vs. Linux?

[Kristian Rink]

Hi Margaret;

Margaret McNulty schrieb:
> as well as to outline the differences between the two. Has anyone here
> gone through the migration process who would like to share their
> experiences?

Well, partly. Some experiences of mine you might read in [1] and the
articles following it. To add to this:


> Besides the major differences like ZFS and Zones, I am
> curious about the minor everyday differences. Because they both operate
> in the Gnome environment, the everyday user might expect

What are "everyday users" in your environment supposed to do? Are they,
like, office users working with a very specifically outlined and
pre-installed set of software? Are they supposed to do multimedia stuff? Are
they mainly software developers?

To cut things a little shorter:

- If being a "simple" desktop user, OpenSolaris in my opinion doesn't really
differ to an up-to-date Linux (or FreeBSD or NetBSD or whatever)
distribution coming with the GNOME desktop environment of the same version.
On the desktop level, end user stuff mainly is GNOME related, and things
don't significantly differ here.

- One of the things a little more difficult (though not that much of a
problem, of course) seems finding pre-built software - the apt repositories
available to Ubuntu or Debian still are way bigger than the IPS repositories
 usable to OpenSolaris users. In some situations (open-source software) this
might not be a problem as most of this stuff should easily compile on an
OpenSolaris system, allowing a local administrator to create packages on
her/his own if needed and distribute them amongst the local machines, in
others (system software, binary stuff) this might not be as easy. VMWare
Server was one of these problems when I dealt with it, switched to
VirtualBox because of that.

- In my opinion, most of the "real" differences are "low-level" enough that
the end/everyday user won't be bothered by them. Which is good, in my
opinion. ;)

Cheers & best regards,
Kristian

[1] http://dm.zimmer428.net/index.php/archives/374

-- 
Kristian Rink
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