c0t0d0s0.eu — Okay,okay ... i know the headline is a little bit provoking. But when you think about some comments from Linux proponents you could think so. This is an interesting development. In the years before, there wasn?t such comments. Solaris was considered as a dead end. But then the game changed.
Oct 20, 2008 View in Crawl 4
thallOct 20, 2008
Article tries to sell opensolaris as a strong competitor to Linux but doesn't make a very good argument. Asking developers to contribute to an existing project with more momentum is hardly a sign that they're scared of competition, mostly because majority of Linux developers aren't driven by competition.There's also a stigma associated with opensolaris: it's strongly tied to Sun. Not trying to be negative about the company, but while no single company has a controlling hand over Linux the same can't be said about opensolaris. This will deter many developers from donating their time and effort to that project.
teefourOct 20, 2008
For all practical desktop usability purposes an Open Solaris system is just a Linux distribution running on a different kernel. You get to run the same applications, using the same GUI's.It's the same thing as with desktop versions of BSD- PCBSD could very well just be the Linux Distro#244678 and nobody would care because all the differences are under the hood and have almost no impact on your "common user's" experience.
hungryduckOct 21, 2008
They are both free. There's no reason to use anything you don't want to. I've tried Opensolaris recently and in it's current state won't provide an Ubuntu-like experience which is what inexperienced Linux users like me love. I can't say it's not developing into something great though.
Closed AccountOct 23, 2008
I'm not sure if OpenSolaris is trying to develop into an Ubuntu-like user experience. I think Sun has the server market in mind when it's developing OpenSolaris, for the most part anyway. They've taken a number of steps to improve the UI, but I think that is more for administrators and power users that are familiar with gnome and the like. Sun's using OpenSolaris as the control domain in their virtualization product, and I believe the Solaris Neveda Development builds are previews of Solaris 11. So I'm not sure if Sun's aiming to replace Ubuntu, or provide a commonly used desktop OS. I use it as a desktop, and I have the same functionality I've enjoyed with various linux distros. In addition, I get a lot of the enterprise grade features that come with a hardened server OS like Solaris 10...