On Thu, 2002-02-28 at 23:43, Rachel Polanskis wrote: > > > I'm sorry to say this but Linux is a long way behind Solaris when it comes > > > to overall quality.
That really is debatable, the value of "quality" will really vary on the
purpose of the machine (as you mention below). IMHO Linux (specifally
Debian) is a long way ahead of Solaris, particularly in the environments
in which they get used by me (more below).
> I don't like to play top ten games - that's for Letterman and his ilk ;)
> Let's just say that Linux is best for X86 and Solaris is best for SPARC.
> It all comes down to fitness for purpose, doesn't it?
Using a clutch of hardware of the ilk U5's, U10's, Ultra Enterprise 2's
and 220r's. By now you'll have noticed this is not the big end of town
which is where you appear to be :)
I'm not out to rubbish Solaris as I think it is an excellent product but
I really agree with your point on "fitness for purpose" and that's where
I'm coming from. Of 12 SPARC boxes, only one is running Solaris (and
only then because we have an application we wrote for Solaris). The rest
are all running Debian. Why?
- Manageability - Solaris is attrocius to administer and keep up to
date. Pkgadd just doesn't really cut it. Keeping a Debian/SPARC box
up-to-date and patched is trivial. Doing the same work on Solaris can
take hours. Then try making packages out them. Valuable sysadmin time is
wasted on Solaris for tasks that are trivial on Debian.
- Performance - Solaris is comparatively slow (refer hardware specs
above) and responsiveness to the tasks we use our boxes for (SAMBA / MTA
/ DNS / NIS / Radius / LDAP / Apache / Netsaint / other stuff) is much,
much better on SPARC hardware running Linux.
All this though, does not mean Solaris is bad for the jobs I mention
above, I simply value my drinking time and like to roll things out
quickly (not rushed). It's very nice to have a PHB say "I need to have X
that does Y" and be able to demo it before he walks back to his office.
If I were running Solaris I wouldn't run circles around our MS admin.
His head is always spinning :)
> native hardware. It's got better support
> for enterprise class apps like Oracle and you don't have to go through
> DLL hell on Solaris quite the same way as Linux. You also only have
Yup, the "big end of town" is Solaris' true home. Our respective
experiences are coming from polar opposite locations :)
> I think too, from a particularly human POV Solaris just "feels smoother"
> than Linux. I know which one I prefer on my desktop, anyway.
> Not having to recompile the kernel to change certain defaults
> is a bonus too, I would have to say.
IMHO the Solaris desktop is rough as guts, even with GNOME it almost
feels usable. Subjective stuff though, we could banter this for days.
> Once you throw a heap of GNU apps on Solaris, there's not much difference
> anyway at least from a user's perspective. Solaris/SPARC defintely has the
> edge on the load as mention previously - I can kill a Pentium 3 500 with
> a make of Mozilla and make the desktop unusable but if I do the same
> build on Sun, the system is stressed to a far lesser degree but of course
> that's a hardware thing, isn't it? I have to keep remembering that.....
That's why my desktop is Debian/SPARC box :)
> Oh yeah - StarOffice 6.0 is free on Solaris too :)
StarOffice? StarOffice is to Open Office what Netscape is to Mozilla :)
> Honestly, it's hard to make a value judgement because I've never used
> Solaris on X86 nor Linux on SPARC,
> so I am trying to compare 2 different OS's on two very different
> hardware platforms which is hardly fair.
Where as I'm comparing them on SPARC alone.
> Typically I don't do x86 BTW although
> I could at present be considered a hypocrite because my current job is
> specifically involving Linux on X86 systems!
Hypocrite! :)
> The thing to bear in mind is that none of them are Microsoft and
> that's what really counts.....
Here! Here!
In the end though, this comes down to two things you mentioned early,
it's fitness for purpose or the subjectiveness of our own experiences /
preferences.
--
Cheers,
Craige.
http://mcwhirter.com.au/
msg20857/pgp00000.pgp
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