Adding my two cents: I use OSOL as my everyday workstation OS. I prefer it to Ubuntu (very slightly, see below), and definitely over WinXP and Win7. One MAJOR reason is that it doesn't break. Ubuntu is always updating, and that reboot always involves a bit of nervousness until the login screen comes through unscathed. The kernel updates work particularly poorly with the NVIDIA driver, almost always requiring a manual driver re-install from the command line, which is a disaster from a usability perspective. As much as I like Ubuntu, it's just not perfect in terms of reliability (though I do have it as the default on my laptop, for every day surfing and stuff, but no heavy-duty computation).
OSOL has NVIDIA 3D drivers, flash, all of the video codecs I've ever needed (though you have to pay Fluendo for the privilege), Acrobat, Bordeaux (which makes it transparent to run, gasp, MSOffice to deal with the crap that other people send me). WinXP in VirtualBox runs everything else, at similar speeds to native XP on a machine a few years ago (and I don't do too much hardcore performance stuff in WinXP, just mostly plotting and making illustrations, etc.). The other huge thing, which I think people discount, is the reliability of ZFS. I have paired mirrors everywhere, and to be able to run a WinXP app on top of ZFS storage is a huge, huge thing. Over the last 15 years, I've all manners of failures, from disk failures to controller cards corrupting the MFT, so I lost a big RAID 5 and had to have it recovered. So OSOL is right for me, right now. The major advantage to having fewer things supported (both hardware and applications) is that they tend to run a bit better. I really don't care if the OS supports a bunch of oddball, no-name hardware. It's not worth the testing time or risk; just tell me the parts that work, and I'll buy them. The hardware cost is far less than that of my own time. Yes, I wish certain applications (Skype, Intel Compiler, GPU CUDA) were supported, but I"m willing to accept the stability and robustness in exchange for that flexibility; I can put Ubuntu and Windows on another disk or machine, when I need them. So, in fact, I think that some of the features that make OSOL a good server OS are the same ones that make it good on the desktop for me. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
