On Thu, 30 Aug 2012, garrett.dam...@dey-sys.com wrote:
So then, I have just a single question: What is the compelling reason for doing all this effort? Why not just load up Ubuntu on your desktop (or buy a Mac, or even run *cough* Windows) and run illumos bits in a VM?
This position you advocate is a very low-performing one and not very reliable either. It is much better to run the inferior OSs in a VM.
The so-called "desktop" is a way to interact with the OS using a graphical interface. It is not necessary for it to directly support idle social applications like "Skype".
On hardware I have here, I find OpenIndiana's "desktop" to be quite performant. I also find Solaris 10's aging "desktop" to be quite performant. I find the "desktop" to be less performant on Linux systems like Ubtuntu because the focus there seem to be to consume all available resources with new effects and exotic graphics which do not contribute to getting things done. It has not taken me long to learn that Ubtuntu is so frightfully complicated that its developers do not quite understand how it works, and they have not even resolved the long-standing randomly-occuring bug that the system ignores requests to shut down and reboots fail to properly initialize the audio device. I have also had Apple hardware and OS here but it suffers from issues particular to Apple's social culture (which bears some resemblance to Oracle) and it is difficult to recommend that someone depend on it for long term use.
Current OpenIndiana is satisfactory for most things that I need and it only lacks ready-made packages for Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and the available Flash plugin. If detractors do not get in the way, forward progress will resume, and these packages will surely appear.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ oi-dev mailing list oi-dev@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/oi-dev
