[indiana-discuss] How good will Indiana be for desktop computing?

[Tim Bray]

On Feb 18, 2008, at 8:51 AM, Bob Netherton wrote:

>
> On Mon, 2008-02-18 at 08:32 -0800, Euan Thoms wrote:
>> I ask this because it sucks in Solaris 10 and even Nevada /  
>> OpenSolaris builds that i have trialled to date.
>
> This is simply not true.  OK, perhaps if you are looking for  
> everything
> to be nicely integrated at install time and supported by the vendor
> (Sun), but there is no gap between what we can do in Solaris and what
> the Ubuntu guys can do.   And the method in obtaining the key pieces  
> is
> quite similar - grab it from a community repository (my personal
> preference is blastwave.org).

Have you used a recent Ubuntu?  A lot of this stuff Just Works out of  
the box.  Plug in a digital camera.  Plug in a scanner.  Right-click  
on a .tiff or .avi.  I agree that in principle the same stuff is  
probably more-or-less available if you understand what the pieces are  
that you're missing and how to get them.  But it's not the same.  -Tim