Hi Luis, *;
though late, a few thoughts of mine to add:
Luis de Bethencourt schrieb:
[...]
> What are these things? It would be great to make a listing of them and
> try to fix them. The better we know the problems the easier we find
> the solutions.
- Generally, asides Time Slider I miss kind of a "killer feature" making me
think "wow, now _that_ is why I want OpenSolaris on the desktop". Sure,
there are a lot of applications (mostly related to system administration -
groups, permissions, network, ...) covering aspects special to OpenSolaris,
but as an end user, this might not be too much of interest, and asides this,
the desktop IMHO is "just another GNOME desktop" to be brutally honest
(especially if one doesn't want/need Time Slider).
- The amount of packages available in the IPS repositories is way too
limited. Actually, maybe this sounds ridiculous, but the one thing _really_
bothering me about OpenSolaris is that I have to go with GNOME in the
default installation and spend time and energy building my desktop of choice
(XFCE), along with some other applications (claws-mail, ...) from source,
which includes installing all the build tools prior to that and dealing with
a lot of small yet annoying issues with each new release of either one of
these apps or OpenSolaris. Ubuntu just wins here because, talking about
Xubuntu, I get what I need out of the box without too much ado. Same for
Fedora. Lack of "many" pre-built packages in my opinion is a major problem.
Here where I am, I usually am asked how to get most up-to-date KDE4 desktop
to work with OpenSolaris...
- The visual interface ("package manager") to IPS is, at least on my system
(Dual Core CPU, 2GHz, 2 GB RAM) horribly slow, no comparison to Ubuntu
synaptic or even the Fedora package manager. The command line based tool
works better but yet is not perfect and not something a "desktop end user"
wants. Along with this, package names and versions are, well, strange at
times: Searching for "the gimp", it took me a while to figure out the
package is named SUNWgnome-img-editor on OpenSolaris, and it took me even
longer to figure out which version of Gimp it actually provides - the
package version number
SUNWgnome-img-editor at 0.5.11,5.11-0.111:20090508T155210Z
is of pretty little help here. This is painful at the very least to those
moving here from GNU/Linux or *BSD.
- As a full-time GNU/Linux user, I keep most of my data stored on an
external disk using an ext3 file system. Given these file systems are open
source altogether, I wonder why OpenSolaris can't mount any of these drives
"out of the box", simply while having it plugged in (Disclaimer: the last
time I tried this was in late 2008, not sure how lates releases do here).
This would be helpful. :)
> We all have made small sacrifices when we switched from other systems.
> All the benefits of OpenSolaris shouldn't come with the cost of
> missing X or Y software.
Well... looking at my history, in 1996 I dumped Windows in favor of Linux,
even though this rendered both my CD writer and my sound card unusable for
at least two years immediately. I wouldn't hesitate doing the same again for
OpenSolaris as the platform, in my opinion, generally is rather promising.
To me, at the moment the major problem is: I don't know what OpenSolaris
will be up to as soon as the Sun/Oracle merger has been done... This
uncertainty makes a "full-time adoption" rather difficult these days.
Cheers,
Kristian
--
Kristian Rink
http://pictorial.zimmer428.net # kawazu at jabber.org
"What was once thought can never be unthought."
(Duerrenmatt - 'Die Physiker')
