“The purpose of this document is to detail proposed projects and direction based on an analysis of the existing desktops on Solaris and Linux, but with input from MS Windows and Mac OS/X also being taken into account. Post Solaris 10 a significant effort is being put into making Solaris simple for everyone (not just sys-admins), and this is being done from the ground up. The Keep it Simple Solaris (KiSS) project is at the heart of this.”
>We think it’s important, because an approachable OpenSolaris will enable developers and customers to use OpenSolaris more easily, and that can only help us grow the OpenSolaris community.
>For the average user, the core desktop is all they will ever really experience. In todays world people simply expect things to work, with minimal needs to configure – preferring that nothing at all needs to be configured. This is not an unreasonable request for a desktop user after all the majority of them will have at some time experienced MS Windows and Mac OS/X, both of which do it quite well.
It’s good to see they plan to work in this direction. They want to improve.
I see that it mentions that HAL is being ported to Solaris 10. Does anyone know when FreeBSD will do the same? I’m using GNOME-Volume-Manager, GNOME-Powermanager, and GNOME-Networkmanager, and I have to say that they make my life so much easier.
Another thing that would be nice is beagle.
Isn’t Beagle written in Mono. If so don’t expect Sun to ship it.
Nothing stopping a Blastwave from offering it – then again, they could argue that the Java version of Sherlock and/or Google Search bar, would do the same thing, but using Java technology.
I just hope that they improve the performance of Java on Solaris; previous experiences have not been pleasent, to say the least.
What about amaroK ?
Amarok rocks!
http://amarok.sf.net
Like many other people I was worried about the reality of OpenSolaris and whether it was ever going to happen and if they could pull it off well. Well, I think it’s time to get optimistic. There are now three seperate distros using the Solaris kernel. DTrace is getting ported to FreeBSD showing that there is interest in the code. And now a document like this shows that people really are thinking about this seriously and things are really startign to roll here. Hopefully the KDE on Solaris project will recieve full attention.
The biggest mistake RedHat ever made was try to push its proprietary looks into Gnome. They wasted valuable resources and time and created an inferior product. Once they stopped mucking around and went more with fine tuning the default look, the desktop has become far more usable and friendly to the eyes. I hope Sun does something similar with their JDS. Rather than wasting valuable resources moving buttons around and making an ugly hideous desktop, they should try using the default theme. That alone will fix a lot of the usability problems and will immediately allow people who use gnome with other Linux distro to move back and forth to Solaris.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora pretty much provide the stock GNOME look and feel these days except for some minor feature additions and bug fixes
the care and attention to end user tasks is good. i think solaris/opensolaris will become the de facto non-windows desktop OS.
From the Update Manager GUI to managing all sorts of stuff (like TCP wrappers) via SMF commands to the bundled apps like GIMP 2, etc., Sun has made leaps and bounds progress over Solaris 9. Solaris 10 is almost like moving from Windows 3.11 to Mac OS X, comparatively.
IMO, Sun is now on the 90/10 portion of the effort (the remaining 10 percent of work takes 90 percent of the time), meaning that they really just need to refine what they have. Some people still have trouble accepting Sun’s claim that only Windows, Solaris, and Linux remain as competitive systems (I suppose Mac OS X is implicit), but I think Linux and Solaris complement and reinforce each other to Windows’ disadvantage. It’s only a matter of time.
If Sun actually stopped trying to compete with linux distributers for the time being and focused instead of keeping linux and solaris 100% compatible with each other I think it will get to the point where, choosing between Linux and Solaris will be done purely on performance, not on the operating system itself, because if it is all the same thing on the top layer, Hurd, Solaris, BSD, Linux, Mach, won’t matter.
If Sun actually stopped trying to compete with linux distributers for the time being and focused on making/keeping linux and solaris 100% compatible with each other I think it will get to the point where, choosing between Linux and Solaris will be done purely on performance, not on the operating system itself, because if it is all the same thing on the top layer, Hurd, Solaris, BSD, Linux, Mach, won’t matter.