[advocacy-discuss] OpenSolaris vs. Linux?

[Amit k. Saha]

Hi Margaret,


On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 11:36 AM, Kristian Rink <kawazu at zimmer428.net> wrote:
> 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. ;)

I am a full-time Linux user for 5 years now and the things that I miss
on Solaris in general are the Linux commands like- 'lsusb', etc. A
section in the manual could be devoted to tasks such as these which
cannot be done on Solaris as in Linux. But, first these tasks have to
be identified :-)

As Kristian mentioned, the desktop experience is taken care of by
GNOME- so no real differences.

Also, the new OpenSolaris user would also expect to know some
differences between the way the directories are organized.

Hope that helps.

Thanks,
Amit

-- 
Amit Kumar Saha
http://blogs.sun.com/amitsaha/
http://amitksaha.blogspot.com
Skype: amitkumarsaha