yes, I'm also a long time Linux user/developer who has recently working on Solaris for a research project base on the DTrace tool. It's true there're plenty of powerful tools in Solaris, but some habitual Linux tools are miss or different. And this makes me feel uncomfortable.
Baseing on Solaris kernel's excellent performance and adding Linux tools on it, it is a good way to popularize the Solaris. I think the combination is very important if Sun wants to scramble for the desktop users and the Linux developers. 2007/3/22, Thomas De Schampheleire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
On 3/21/07, Ian Murdock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > There are some interesting connections to Linux here as well. If you > think about it, what do people want when they say they want "Linux"? > The Linux kernel? Or the Linux distribution (i.e., GNU)? Could Solaris > become a "better Linux than Linux" by following that line of thinking? > And if you following that line of thinking, where does that lead the > company in terms of Linux strategy? Some interesting parallels > open up with the way Sun masterfully embraced x86 a few years ago... As a Linux user who has recently started working with the OpenSolaris kernel for a project, I have been thinking about this as well. What I personally find important in Linux is: - the user experience, mostly embodied by the KDE desktop environment. I don't like Gnome, so I don't like the default Solaris desktop environment. I heard that there is a KDE project for OpenSolaris, so that is great. If most of the GUI programs would run on OpenSolaris as well, then the biggest challenge has been overwon I think. - then there are the command line programs. There might be a good reason for this, but I feel that some of the Solaris-shipped tools are inferior to the GNU tools. For example, I don't see a reason why a simple recursive grep with 'grep -R' does not work on Solaris. Why there are two greps is something I do not understand either. I do not get the way man works either. On Linux, you would just do "man cat" or "man vi", and it would just give you the correct man page. Even 'man man' doesn't work here. (I'm beginning to wonder whether this may be because the man pages are not installed... could this be? man man should work, right?) I agree that a lot of this frustration is more because it is unknown and different than what I am used to. But I think this will be the case for a lot of users which come from Linux, and if Solaris wants to make these people change OS, this should be taken into account. - the actual kernel is not very important from a user point of view I think. What is important is the hardware support, and I am not sure to what extent OpenSolaris is good at this. For example, I have an Acer laptop with an embedded webcam. For Linux, there was reasonably quickly a driver (gspca) available. I don't know if this would have been the case with OpenSolaris. Of course, this also depends on the size of the developer community and I think that's were Linux has a plus. As a developer, the kernel code of OpenSolaris seems much more documented and organised than that of Linux, which is definitely a plus. If OpenSolaris can get these three points right, I believe it could be a great alternative... _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
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