Linked by Robert Escue on Wed 2nd Mar 2005 22:28 UTC
The vast majority of operating system reviews are the result of a user spending a few days or weeks using a particular operating system and writing about their observations. This review is the result of my continued use of Solaris 10 (previously Solaris Express) from August 2003 to February 2005.
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I bought a Sun Blade of eBay a year ago and I'm using it as my primary desktop. I installed Solaris 10 on it a week or two after it came out.
Eventually it'll just be a server since it's fairly quiet and I have two decently sized hard drives mirrored (although I used a tutorial I found on the web that wasn't as quick as the review made it seem possible, nor did I do it during the install). But until then, I'm using it for everything . . . or at least all that it can manage.
One really interesting thing I noticed, though: I remember from a review on this site of a Sun Blade 100 that installing the media libraries for SPARC's SSE-like instruction set could improve performance. It did some under Solaris 9. I noticed a nicer desktop experience immediately when I installed Solaris 10. I downloaded the media libraries packages, but when I went to install them it said they were already installed.
I guess since Solaris is only supporting later generations of processors that are all 64-bit, they all also include the VIS extensions? Maybe a lot more software was compiled as being aware of it?
Compared to Solaris 9, it's quite a bit better as a desktop, but still not wonderful. The only thing it doesn't do well is movie playback for more complicated stuff like divx or DVDs. Blastwave.org makes it all worthwhile, though.