1. Documentation is a major pain in the ass to find. Outside of man pages
and the occasional Sun engineer blog entry, there seems to be no decent
documentation. In fact, most people admit that the "Solaris 10" books that
are currently out, are simply Solaris 9 books with a new cover. How is a
user who asks "is there a equivalent" supposed to actually find out if it
exists?
Personally, I find docs.sun.com to be an outstanding source of
documentation, especially on some very obscure technologies in Solaris.
Yes, there have been times when I wished that there were more examples, and
when I wished that the search engine was better, but overall, docs.sun.com
has top-notch content against which many other computer companies can
measure themselves. The documentation is extremely well organized and
structured. (docs.hp.com and techpubs.sgi.com are comparable in that
regard.)
2. Ease of use .... Now, I know that most of you old school UNIX guys laugh
at this, but usability is important. You've tuned me into a cool way to do
something along the lines of USE flags in Solaris, but it sure sounds like
it's not gonna be easy.
I guess the hardest part is getting the software to compile on Solaris.
After that it's just a matter of providing the correct compile switches to
Sun Studio compilers to generate corresponding Instruction Set Architecture
optimized binaries.
But other than that, how hard can it be to do a `cp` of /usr/lib/isaexec to
the name of the binary?
Using Ubuntu for an example, the reason it's become so popular so fast is
not at all because it's superior. In fact, I can't stand quite a few things
about it. It's become so popular so fast, because it's *EASY*. Without ease
of use, no matter how awsome the feature set is, you're just gonna end up
being the thing people use only when they absolutely have to.
Yes, but ease of use only works for desktop systems. Internet however isn't
powered by desktops, it's powered by a massive, decentralized
infrastructure, and is a very large number of businesses.
In practice, the convenience approach can only work so much, until the whole
model collapses. It might work very well for a single desktop system, but
after a certain people to systems ratio, the whole model can't support the
needs of the user or users any more.
Ultimately, neither the "convenience administration" nor a single desktop
system paradigm will be able to survive what will eventually come our way.
The writing's on the wall. Desktop's days are numbered; it might take years,
but it will come.
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