> Now let us correct the first statement to: > > There is no directly visible commercial benefit for > oracle to try > displacing ubuntu in the desktop market. There is > however a drawback > for Oracles commercial success in case that Solaris > is no longer viable > on the desktop.
Thank you, yes! Desktops are the entry point to future mindshare. And laptops, even if Oracle doesn't sell them, are useful to developers, for demonstrating applications that run on Solaris, and sometimes for on-site debugging or other unusual recovery purposes; I know for a fact that people have put JumpStart servers (i.e. network installation server, whatever the equivalent will be for OpenSolaris or Solaris next) on laptops, for those situations where whether because of remoteness or of no prior adequate preparation, or some other reason, no adequate facilities existed. A laptop may not take full advantage of a primarily server OS (lacking core count, massive RAM, internal bandwidth, multiple disks, etc), nor be fully served by lack of drivers for every last feature of their touchpads, flash card readers, etc. But having one be at least basically usable is quite helpful indeed. (AFAIK, the only SPARC workstations still sold are laptops, by Tadpole (now part of General Dynamics; but a much less expensive x86 laptop can act as an install server for both SPARC and x86 systems, so laptop support on x86 would be far more accessible to most people.) There are customers that spend _lots_ of money with Oracle that still use Solaris on some desktops or laptops. Whether or not Oracle (or Sun) currently sells desktops or laptops is beside the point, if desktop support helped in any way to sell all that nice juicy _profitable_ big iron. (I sure would like to see a SPARC workstation with a T2 chip in it though...I think it would run pretty well, since with all those threads, there wouldn't need to be a whole lot of context switches. A truly multithreaded X server would help though, so that xlsfonts -lll wouldn't be a DoS attack, but I expect that's a lot to ask.) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
