> I am curious - how many people here in these > OpenSolaris forums have OpenSolaris installed on > their PCs at home (for personal non-work-related > use)? Or are they mostly discussing OpenSolaris > problems they have at work/school? (By 'people', I > mean the users, not the OpenSolaris developers for > whom OpenSolaris may be both work and personal > hobby.) Does anyone have any idea?
My mother uses Solaris (10u5) exclusively. I had been trying to get her to use a computer (Windows, Mac, & various Linux distros) for many years but always failed until the S10u3 came along. I know everyone will think that I must be insane to even suggest a Solaris machine to a (very) senior citizen who is a 100.0% computer illiterate. But in retrospect, when you consider maturity, security, stability, simplicity (of desktop design), etc., and the fact that it satisfies the most needs (e-mail, web browsing, IM, photo display and management), Solaris actually turns out to be a very good, even an ideal, choice. Many thanks are also given to Blastwave.org, which has ported many 2D games to Solaris. I use OpenSolaris almost exclusively both at work and at home. But I have my own very special reasons for doing that which don't apply to even many of Sun's own employees. Plus, I also always have Linux (SuSE) and Windows machines at my disposal (again both at work and at home), a luxury most don't have. At this time, it can be very difficult to convince someone to use OpenSolaris as a primary OS especially at home. However, I am seeing that things are changing. Before the Indiana project (OpenSolaris 2008.05), there was never any serious concerted effort (even wrt SXDE) to design OpenSolaris into something with a close to beta quality and suitable for daily use. Now that OpenSolaris is moving into its second iteration (OS 2008.11), we may expect the situation to improve. But more importantly, it may soon reach an inflection point where we will see its advantages (such as ease of updating, package management, CDDL, expectation of Solaris-type quality, availability of long-term support, etc.,) substantially outweigh its disadvantages. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
