Comments inline: > 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.
No software is perfect, as I think you acknowledge. I totally that it is up to the community to engage itself in the process. > > > 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. Apologies, I meant to say that, because OpenSolaris was originally derived from Solaris, that this naturally means that it is focussed on large business users. As you say, it is not Sun's problem if consumers don't like it. > > > 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. I disagree completely. For technical users the command line is probably their tool of choice, but for non-technical users a GUI equivalent is generally required. Cheers Andrew. > > Regards... Sean. > _______________________________________________ > opensolaris-discuss mailing list > [email protected] This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
