> So now, the reasons why I think solaris/opensolaris are > well suited to be servers and not so much as desktops: > > gnome etc, the gui of opensolaris is no better at task > switching and application management than windows XP > was. This is obsolete compared to aero, aqua, or > compiz. (win7, osx, and ubuntu) These other OSes > offer gui's which are much more powerful and flexible > in terms of application management and task switching.
I don't know for a fact how it is with GNOME and Xorg, but certainly with CDE and Xsun, the IA scheduling class is supported, which is like the regular TS (time sharing) scheduling class except that the window with the focus gets a priority boost for the sake of better perceived interactive performance. As for the other stuff, I think the existing environment is not glamorous, but perfectly adequate. A KDE desktop is also available, although perhaps not formally supported. Personally, I think KDE feels faster and looks better, and maybe is a bit more functional than GNOME for a desktop, but that may be subjective. Certainly there are multiple window managers that can work. Oh, and it looks like compiz has been ported; your results may vary depending on the degree to which the graphics hardware you use is supported. http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+desktop/compiz > The application availability on sol/osol is not as good > as win/mac/linux. For example: Dropbox and skype are > both available win/mac/linux. No solaris. Flash is > available win/mac/linux/solaris. Silverlight is > available win/mac. No linux or solaris. Bittorrent: > win/mac/linux. Bittorrent: there are some clients that work on Solaris. There's certainly a text based one, and to the extent that Vuze is just Java, it might work too. Opera (no longer being updated for Solaris, unfortunately) includes BitTorrent support. I've seen mention of a way involving a magic web site to use Skype. I think people have also used it in lx branded zones, although those are on the way out (at least unless the community takes over support for them). > There are no desktop apps available in sol/osol, which > aren't also available in the other platforms. But > there are lots of apps available in the other > platforms, which aren't available in sol/osol. Well, there's a GUI front end for DTrace, for developers, although Apple did that too. And there's the time slider thingie, which is a little like Apple's Time Machine, except not nearly the eye candy, but probably _much_ quicker because it uses ZFS snapshots. There probably are a few other desktop apps that are (Open)Solaris only (or first), but given the numbers, and that it tends to be easier to port from Solaris to Linux (or a Mac with X11) than the other way around, I wouldn't expect there to be very many such, and most of them would be commercial (and very expensive) probably. > I have never put sol/osol to sleep. So I cannot say > anything about this. Does it work? Is it highly > configurable and reliable? It works if all the drivers in use support suspend/resume. Unfortunately, not all do. > Hardware compatibility for audio/video is a problem for > sol/osol. Not very good at 3D. Not compatible with > lots of webcams and microphone devices and cameras etc. > And printers. Video is not very far behind Linux. 3D can be either software, or in limited cases, hardware. Standards-compliant cameras and audio devices work. If you're using CUPS (soon to be the default?), that's pretty much what a Mac uses for printing AFAIK (and most Linux?), so that's better than you think too. Heck, printing was never a problem if one knew a little magic, it was only hard if you thought it was all going to be automatic or just a bit of point-and-click. > For both sol/osol and linux, there is no good calendar > application. You need either Outlook, Entourage, or > iCal for this. Reliable reminders available > online/offline, with addressbook and email integration. SeaMonkey has a calendar, AFAIK. There's a calendar app associated with the Firefox/Thunderbird suite if you prefer those (I forgot the name). There's probably some GNOMEish thing too. (I rarely use calendar apps, being way too old school for that, so I can't speak to the relative usefulness of those compared to Windows and Mac alternatives.) > By default during installation, even if you indicate > you aren't going to use it remotely, sshd is enabled. > > By default, there is no firewall. There certainly _is_ a firewall. It might not be enabled by default; exactly what rules should it have to offer lots of protection without locking out legitimate access, and how is the installer going to know it should use rules suitable for a desktop (which might need zero remote access) rather than a server? But that could be "improved" (a very subjective thing) quite easily, I think, since it's little more than what the prepackaged configuration looks like; not really any additional software needed as such. > I haven't used sol/osol for wifi. Does it have a good > wifi utility for joining networks? Wifi works, although there probably aren't enough drivers to work with whatever random hardware people throw at it. I don't know about the GUI front end, since my Suns (older UltraSPARC workstations) don't have WiFi devices anyway. There may be some refinement lacking as a desktop for the user who'd be better off on a Mac anyway. But, provided you check on hardware compatibility before you buy hardware rather than putting (Open)Solaris on as an afterthought, all the basic functionality is there. 3rd party apps tend to be a problem; that's mostly a matter of numbers, where Solaris is pretty small to get their developer's attention. (Open)Solaris could be made into a passable kiosk-like environment for minimal e-mail and web browsing for someone's grandmother. Or it could be quite useful for a developer or sales person (demonstrating something Solaris related or hosted) on the road. It's those people in between, that want every possible functionality on whatever random cheap hardware they already have, that may not be satisfied. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
