Hey andrewk9, I shall reply to you, but my 2 cents applies to other comments in this thread; so apols if I bang on about stuff that you have not directly or indirectly commented on.
> 1. We in the community should not be expecting Sun to be addressing all of > the shortcomings in OpenSolaris. The community needs to be involved in a > meaningful way in improving it. A first step to improving collaboration might > be to add a wiki to OpenSolaris.org . OpenSolaris _empirically_ has no shortcomings. Well, the major shortcoming (which is being constantly and actively addressed) is that not 100% of it is open; but that is largely out of the control of Sun (hardware support/crypto/export restrictions). The remainder of it is open, accessible, and modifiable to your own requirements; and if you think to the benefit of others, then there is a mechanism (ia a Sun sponsor) whereby you can submit such personal modifications to Sun for assessment for potential inclusion into future releases. Thus the community is as "involved" as it chooses to be. > 2. Sun's lack of presence in the consumer market (as distinct from the > business market) is one of the reasons Solaris is not as user friendly as > alternatives (as a Windows user, naturally Windows springs to my mind here). > One way of improving usability might be to create a distro focussed solely on > the consumer space, where we can pretty much assume that the user has no > previous technical knowledge at all. This is a comment on Solaris and not OpenSolaris. Solaris is indeed focused on the business community; and quite rightly so. It is an operating environment that is deployed in many mission-critical environments around the world; and it performs admirably in such environments. The lack of a "pretty" GUI front-end in such environments is absolutely inconsequential. I agree that the lack of pretty user interface will stop Solaris becoming part of the consumer-user space. This again is quite correct and apt. OpenSolaris is available to be "interesting" to developers; including GUI developers. Prettied-up OpenSolaris distros will become available over time (if they do not already exist). Solaris will maintain a marginally pretty GUI at best IMO. > 3. Your point about command line versus GUI is an excellent point. In my > view, this is the single biggest shortcoming of most Unix-based operating > systems (OS-X excepted). One way to improve this in Solaris would be to > develop GUI equivalents to all of those really useful command line tools we > use to administer (Open)Solaris. UNIX-based operating environments should have GUI's, but not for administration. To be an administrator of a UNIX-based system mandates that you understand the underlying commands (and potentially what underlies them); thus the command line is absolutely sufficient. Regards... Sean. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
