[indiana-discuss] Downloadsquad presents OpenSolaris 2008.05 from a GNU/Linux POV

[Laurent Blume]

Brian Nitz a écrit :
> Indeed it is a happy collection of accidents, (n-1)! combinations of 
> hardware with the survivors being the ones which happen to run Microsoft 
> Windows.  I still believe the best way of presenting a really clean 
> well-integrated desktop experience is to either own a 90%+ desktop 
> market share and force everyone to play by our rules, (e.g. Microsoft), 
> or to provide strict controls on the user software and hardware which 
> interacts with our OS.  (e.g. Apple)

Brian,

I understand your feeling, but as Sun chose to play on that market, it
can't really complain now that the rules are too hard. They were known
beforehand.

And let me remind you that there are still plenty of issues on x86
hardware produced by Sun, so presumably fully under Sun control, to run
Sun's own operating systems, on which Sun also has, AFAICT, full control.

As a sysadmin, I quite relate to the experience of that guy. And your
excerpts are not quite objective. He does say that Linux also has
problems with USB mice. The difference is that, for him, those problems
never resulted in a complete hang of the system, and that's quite
significant.

Solaris, and probably still OpenSolaris at this point, does not take
into account that the hardware it runs on nowadays is cheap and flabby.
So minor issues easily turn into major crashes. I know work is in
progress to fix it, but with all the noise Sun has been doing, you can't
 complain that people are trying the system as it is, /now/.

And of course, the very clear unwillingness of Sun to fix known driver
issues in its fully supported OS line, when the fix is not asked by a
Fortune 50 company, has so far been very annoying.

I'm looking forward to see how it will go with OpenSolaris.

In the meantime, I find that this article, for a guy that has spent half
a day fighting stupid driver issues, isn't as negative as you make it
sound like. He concludes that /this/ release of OpenSolaris is not for
the casual user. Well, I agree with him. And I wouldn't advise my mom to
use it, either.

The world will judge only the end result, not on the intentions of the
designers, however good they were.

Laurent
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