On Jul 30, 2007, at 12:49 PM, andrewk9 wrote: > I agree entirely with this post. My thoughts: > > 1. We in the community should not be expecting Sun to be addressing > all of the shortcomings in OpenSolaris. The community needs to be > involved in a meaningful way in improving it. A first step to > improving collaboration might be to add a wiki to OpenSolaris.org . > > 2. Sun's lack of presence in the consumer market (as distinct from > the business market) is one of the reasons Solaris is not as user > friendly as alternatives (as a Windows user, naturally Windows > springs to my mind here). One way of improving usability might be > to create a distro focussed solely on the consumer space, where we > can pretty much assume that the user has no previous technical > knowledge at all. > > 3. Your point about command line versus GUI is an excellent point. > In my view, this is the single biggest shortcoming of most Unix- > based operating systems (OS-X excepted). One way to improve this in > Solaris would be to develop GUI equivalents to all of those really > useful command line tools we use to administer (Open)Solaris.
I think a lot of people keep missing the point that Solaris' bread and butter is the enterprise server market. I don't know what the ratio of server to desktop installations is, but I'd guess that it's very tilted in one direction. Solaris shines on the server. Solaris can shine on the desktop, but that isn't its main focus. Solaris would have to break into a very crowded market and make a better GUI. Competition: Microsoft Apple Ubuntu SuSE others? You'd have to convince Sun that the desktop market is as, or more important than the server market that makes them their revenues. I love my Macs, but I'd rather have Solaris when I launch the Terminal application... -john (written on a Mac) _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
