> As a Linux user who has recently started working with > the OpenSolaris > kernel for a project, I have been thinking about this > as well. > > What I personally find important in Linux is: > - the user experience, mostly embodied by the KDE > desktop environment. > I don't like Gnome, so I don't like the default > Solaris desktop > environment. I heard that there is a KDE project for > OpenSolaris, so > that is great. If most of the GUI programs would run > on OpenSolaris as > well, then the biggest challenge has been overwon I > think.
I sort of agree on that - KDE is certainly easier to get into quickly. Although GNOME may have more potential in some ways, it seems slow to get lean, and get a settled set of apps that do what people want; I know I'd rather have one app that did a whole job (email, say) well, than two that each did 2/3 of what I wanted them to. > - then there are the command line programs. There > might be a good > reason for this, but I feel that some of the > Solaris-shipped tools are > inferior to the GNU tools. For example, I don't see a > reason why a > simple recursive grep with 'grep -R' does not work on > Solaris. Why > there are two greps is something I do not understand > either. The commands in /usr/bin, /usr/xpg4/bin, and so on are the way they are because compatibility is more important than doing what you (or I, or everybody put together) want them to. That way, existing end-user scripts and apps just keep working. Even adding features in a supposedly compatible way can sometimes break things. That doesn't mean that all your fave GNU tools can't be in some other directory, nor even that a particular site might not choose to create user accounts so that they saw the GNU version of tools in preference to other versions, so as long as you don't hard-code pathnames, it shouldn't matter much. If you think that's over the top, think again. Most places that have been around that long have scripts and apps that haven't been touched in years if not decades; nobody can proactively maintain them anymore, and yet they're part of earning the income that keeps the place open, so breaking them just to fix or replace them is not a desirable option. Mainframes are even worse; they're likely to have programs on them that are just about unchanged since the late 60's. Again, that doesn't preclude new functionality, it just means one doesn't usually get that as first choice out of the box. Of course, even if Sun's Solaris distro won't go there, there's nothing preventing other OpenSolaris distros from having various goodies favored out of the box. I hear Nexenta is like that. > I do not get the way man works either. On Linux, you > would just do > "man cat" or "man vi", and it would just give you the > correct man > page. Even 'man man' doesn't work here. (I'm > beginning to wonder > whether this may be because the man pages are not > installed... could > this be? man man should work, right?) The "man" command works fine if you have it and the pages installed. You do have to build the indexes if you want to do man -k keyword but that's about it. Oh, and if you want to specify a section of the manual (like when there are pages by the same name in different sections), the syntax is man -s section page unlike some other systems, where you don't need the -s. > I agree that a lot of this frustration is more > because it is unknown > and different than what I am used to. But I think > this will be the > case for a lot of users which come from Linux, and if > Solaris wants to > make these people change OS, this should be taken > into account. Ok. And I think that, even if not quite out of the box, that can actually be done now. I mean, it's not like you get an install option to please make this look as much like Linux as possible, but it doesn't take a whole lot of work to accomplish that, and may well take less in the future. I'd probably be in a similar position on Linux - trying to figure out how to make it look more like Solaris, or at least an SVR4 derivative, except that unlike you, the kernel _does_ matter to me because I've worked with Unix since the PDP-11 days, and don't draw a line between GUI, application innards, and kernel when I've got a problem; I just keep digging. But I know I'm not "normal" in that regard... > - the actual kernel is not very important from a user > point of view I > think. What is important is the hardware support, and > I am not sure to > what extent OpenSolaris is good at this. For example, > I have an Acer > laptop with an embedded webcam. For Linux, there was > reasonably > quickly a driver (gspca) available. I don't know if > this would have > been the case with OpenSolaris. Of course, this also > depends on the > size of the developer community and I think that's > were Linux has a > plus. I think a 1394 (Firewire) webcam should usually work fine; I've got one hooked up to my SPARC, no problem. Someone (both inside Sun and outside, although I think they were sharing info later on) is working on a USB webcam; I haven't followed it enough to know whether they're close yet. > As a developer, the kernel code of OpenSolaris seems > much more > documented and organised than that of Linux, which is > definitely a > plus. The discipline that goes into that is the same that makes it a considered and sometimes slow process to make changes that might break anything or represent new commitments that might set up a situation that would cause future problems. I think that priorities could shift a little without throwing that out, but I wouldn't expect Solaris to ever be bleeding edge consumer oriented, certainly not in the just back up some files and start over from scratch way that most people probably upgrade their systems. OpenSolaris, with its alternative distributions, could get closer to that perhaps, but hopefully all distributions will stick with the notion of quality (even if not quite so much compatibility) first, before feeping creaturism. > If OpenSolaris can get these three points right, I > believe it could be > a great alternative... This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
