On 7/7/05, Sunil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I don't think anybody is getting your point and I think they never will, and > it is the same mentality that has cost sun bigtime in last 3 years (if only > sun had the vision of open sourcing solaris even during or close to dotcom > bust, it would have been opensolaris all over not linux). Doing cool things > and inventing new technologies is one thing, and moving with times and > getting accepted as a useable system is quite another. Linux is miles away > from usability point of view. Opensolaris will be there soon, now that people > are demanding and putting in effort to get things based on what they want.
Linux is not "miles away" from a usability point of view. Miles is an exaggeration at best. I've used Linux since 1994 and I had very little trouble adjusting to working on a Solaris system which I just started doing at the beginning of this year. Mostly thanks to SUN's excellent documentation and many friendly SUN engineers who have helped along the way. The point is SUN has a customer base that they are responsible to, and despite your warnings of doom or otherwise, backwards compatibility is an extremely important feature of Solaris to those customers. Things like standards compliance and architecture review committees are almost a completely foreign thing to most Linux distributions. I believe that in part, SUN Is providing OpenSolaris to give people like you who want to do things differently the ability to do so. But in the meantime, harping continually about it without well thought out detailed reasonings isn't going to earn you the responses you're probably wanting. Meanwhile, Linux's much vaunted usability doesn't amount to a hill of beans many times since it's programming APIs (especially the kernel driver API) are so incredibly unstable that each new kernel revision breaks drivers produced by private companies which in turns makes for a very poor usability experience on the part of the user. Backwards compatibility is one of those parts of usability that when it's done right the user never sees it, and so goes on ignorantly happy. But when people like Linux developers start trashing entire APIs (business as usual) you can bet the user will notice. Think of how much farther along certain aspects of the Linux user experience might be if they had spent as much time as SUN has ensuring that their customer's needs were met instead of wrecking everything in the name of progress. There has to be a happy medium and I'm convinced that starting with Solaris 10, SUN has achieved that. > I have cursed bourne shell everytime I have to boot from CD or boot to safe > mode to do some stuff (you can't really put it in .profile in this case can > you?). you are typing /dev/c0d0s3 when you wanted /dev/c1d0s3, hit backspace > and get ^H. so you do stty erase ^H. and of course the long typed command is > gone, type it again. No GPM to help you with cut and paste either. Command > line editing is a small thing that makes a huge useability impact. If > opensolaris wants to convert linux users, it should be ready to accept few > realities. I don't see how a default shell is as big an issue as you say, and as you already mentioned OpenSolaris gives people who don't like this the ability to change it. > I have never understood why is sun still stuck with bourne shell as the > default shell when bash has been a stable and compatible shell for years and > is so popular with developers. I have not seen any catastrophic effect of > bash on our thousands of linux boxes and we have been using them for over a > year now. I have used /bin/sh as a link to /bin/bash on solaris 9 forever and > still have to see something die on me. The operating system on your thousands of Linux boxes have never had to worry about satisfying the needs of millions of customers while retaining backwards compatibility. It is a certainty that if SUN decided to change the default shell that at least some of their customers (if not many) would experience a wide variety of issues with shell scripts and other tools that they use on a daily basis. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
