Hey Ian Murdock, at present, There will never be a "Free" UNIX Desktop Operating System that will enjoy the worldwide success of Microsoft Windows. and we all know why.
1./-Microsoft provides utter and complete Driver support for anything, and of course ease of use (who cares whether it was/is command-line or GUI -that never stopped the DOS juggernaut). The Applications just won't matter without any/all low-level drivers. 2./-Microsoft-based PC's are solely resposible for the largest selling "network/online" Gameing apps ever, yes, and I do mean WoW, Guild Wars,...oh ya, Game consoles too, just look at the Xbox impact and Microsoft Games. future looks good doesn't it ? The Graphics, and AI, as we all know are simply astounding. Those are the pending Mars-like challenges awaiting OpenSolaris to succeed as a viable Home Desktop Computing machine. Its the "kitchen-sink" or nothing! "Microsofts' DRM's ?, gray-area legalities?,.... dont matter, gloves off, they are doing it anyway. In-house fighting between UNIX camps is what Microsoft stokes, and so far, we(all potential consumers/users) are all getting burnt from those fires". Desktops right? Not Servers: Now, As far as a mission-critical UNIX/"Net"OS goes. nuthin', and I mean absolutely nuthin' touches a Sun Microsystems server. I've seen $2Million worth of (12)IBM 440 scrap hardware servers running RedHat Enterprise 3 (RHEL 3) end up just serving web pages in 2003/4. They were supposed to replace our "single" used Sun E10K/Sparc Solaris 8 running an Oracle transactional database. At midnight I had to fire the E10K back on, of course I used that failed downtime to Jumpstart the E10K with Solaris 10 -and we never looked back and its "still" Solaris 10/Oracle on Sun hardware. (auto-patching of course :) Lack of proper IBM/Redhat/Oracle server support at that time,and driver issues involving RHEL3 and the Fibre cards attached to our EMC disk arrays was the end-cause. When "live" downtime is costing $1000/minute -you don't look back you just go with what you got, and more obviously what works ! Did that suprise me at the time ? Honestly NOPE, but it did surprise our "then" silly management for that IT server blunder. Does RHEL4 have all that fixed ? Well I would hope so by now! but it doesn't matter anymore 'cause we don't use IBM/RH/Linux for anything but some web servers. And unfortunately "all" our companies Desktops run WinXP, or Windows Vi$ta. So, what does that have to do with OpenSolaris on a Desktop? -Just that, I personally, would like nuthin' better than OpenSolaris to provide "that" kind-of a stable Home Destop environment. But OpenSolaris will have to accomplish what Sun Microsystems accomplished with its servers/OS(and that took 25 years of development), and too make it a little harder OpoenSolaris must incorporate 1./ , and 2./ above to succeed. But the hardest part never ends, and that is to keep all of above up-to-date on a daily basis forever, and ever... -I sound like a whineing real-estate agent screaming "Location, location, location,..." but instead its "Drivers, drivers, drivers..." anyway, I don't need to be told how good Solaris is -I already know! I could only wish to implement advice so easily given. so lets Just DO the rest of the "real" work will ya' ? :) regards, and best of luck, Rick.[b][/b][b][/b] This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
