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I think the problem here, binarycrusader, is that there are people who think that desktop equates to home users. There are more people in the world who use desktops besides home users.

For a large corporation, if Sun can offer an end to end solution; if you don't want to use Sun Ray appliances then work out a deal for Solaris to be loaded on each desktop, I'm sure Sun would come to the party and hammer out a deal.

There are also developers who aren't operating system technically inclined; they want to get onto the operating system, do their work, and not have to worry about the underlying issues - if Sun can make a good desktop for them, along with the 'creative crowd' that they're trying to attract with JavaFX as a replacement to Flash/Silverlight, again, more customers for Sun to sell too :-)

I think the problem is this, people assume Sun wants to 'take over the world' like Microsoft when all Sun wants to do is make a decent profit. Not every company has Microsoft-like wet dreams which people here make assumptions over.

Edited 2007-07-17 15:14

Yes but Red Hat was first. It becomes harder and harder, especially that more and more technicians are well-versed with Linux, and that you can get the best Linux desktops for free. If you need support, ask your team in your company. It's like the way people ask for support on Windows, everybody knows how to solve problems on Windows.

No way. Sun was there WAY before Red Hat, except that Sun sold the whole hardware+software+services package.

What Sun is trying to do now is regain their share of the services pie now that the hardware+software package became commoditised.

Today still, someone versed in Solaris have much bigger paychecks than Linux technicians. And that's because Solaris is still very niche-y. As Sun continues to lower the barrier for entry, the platform's popularity is poised to rise. The money will change hands, however; but it's about time the value of a professional is measured not in knowing the differences between command line flags between userland implementations, but knowing how to put the tools together to outperform competing alternatives.

And in this sense Solaris is heading the right direction. It's userland provides little to no advantage over regular BSD's or GNU's, but the in-kernel stuff like ZFS, DTrace, zones and the fully virtualisable netstack, provide enormous value. And while those technologies are being either ported or cloned to other OSs, one can hardly dispute Solaris is always going to be the one with better integration.

I for one am closely watching this project, because, quite frankly, the Solaris userland sucks. It's old and cranky and much due for an overhaul.


OTOH I can only hope they make it easy to compile packages from source, because only quite recently the apt-* tools started not to massively suck in this regard.