At the risk of getting my own head bitten off: One the one hand, your message should be a good indication of how OpenSolaris affects brand new users. It's not Linux, and that's a good thing in many ways. What you need to realize is that getting all of the user interface tweaks correct is not the top priority for the development, and if you look at the incremental improvements in OpenSolaris over the last few years, it dwarfs everything else out there (Windows, Mac and Linux are not much improved over the last year or two). Have a little patience with the user interface (it took me months to get smart enough to ask on this forum how to fix my video driver so my dual-monitor setup persisted through a reboot; in both Windows and Linux this was automatically taken care of---so I feel your frustration). Eventually I'd expect everything to get fixed properly.
However, your last sentence, more than anything else, points out what you're missing. There is no partition table editor in the installer because OpenSolaris, by default, uses ZFS. This is an entirely superior solution in so many deep ways, compared to the partition-based mess in almost any other operating system. ZFS is good enough reason to use OpenSolaris alone; watch some of the movies online (there was a 3-part super-long video by Jeff Bonwick at a storage conference last year, that shows in great detail its power). Compare its power to the mess that Linux is going through, with the performance and security of the EXT4 filesystem, and you'll see that OpenSolaris has a very different approach, and it's better. There are other superior features that others on this forum know far more about than I do. In my experience, Ubuntu breaks every time I auto-update the Linux kernel, and I have to do a manual command-line-based video driver re-install. This is an enormous pain. OpenSolaris has snapshots and boot environments, that allow easy rollbacks to the exact state before updates, and nothing has ever really broken on an upgrade, even in the development version. You'll find that the code quality is much higher, and there is a lot less stuff that breaks. If you think the OpenSolaris is basically Linux with different colors in the background, you're missing the point. Have a little patience and poke around a bit, and you may find that some of its capabilities are light-years ahead of anything else out there. No question that the user interface is a bit of the rough side, and it's a bit of pain at the outset. It's a bit like a racetrack-optimized Porsche that happens to be street-legal. You won't have an iPod-plugin and a huge sound system, but it will go faster around the track than a minivan that has a few more creature comforts. I'd encourage you to take a look a little more deeply, and you may find that the unique capabilities available will outweigh the inconvenience of some quirks in the user interface... just my two cents... -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
