The Linux desktop has come a long way. It's a fully usable, stable, and secure operating system that can be used quite easily by the masses. Not too long ago, Sun figured they could do the same by starting Project Indiana, which is supposed to deliver a complete distribution of OpenSolaris in a manner similar to GNU/Linux. After using the latest version for a while, I'm wondering: why?
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Member since:2005-07-06
...which is a tiny portion of all the software installed in a common distro, and pretty much all desktop software doesn't really care about "management frameworks" (except everything about hardware management, which is abstracted properly in HAL/DeviceKit). They care about basic POSIX operations. In fact they don't even care about that, most of them can run/will run on Win32. The fact that many FOSS apps are so portable shows how irrelevant kernels have become - there is nothing on linux or solaris or any other kernel that "ties" the app to that specific kernel and makes impossible to port the app to other systems.
At the end of the day, what you have is the Firefox/Evolution/Nautilus/Openoffice GUI. Users press buttons and the apps do something. There is nothing special in kernels these days that make the buttons better, and they can't improve sucky aplications either. The last time I saw kernel changing something on the desktop was with the nautilus "snapshot" functionality that only works in ZFS systems - and that can be emulated with LVM and the corresponding NT equivalent...
Management frameworks, etc. matter more than you want to admit. Management frameworks deal with things like network failures, configuration, etc. which obviously *do* matter to users -- as just one example.
Another item is the audio subsystem, Boomer, which unlike Linux-kernel-based OS distributions has fully virtualized audio much like (apologies for the comparison) Windows 7 or Vista. And depending on your hardware, it can support surround sound as well.
So management frameworks and subsystems do matter, and a key differentiator for OpenSolaris is that many applications have been tightly integrated with those management frameworks and subsystems. As opposed to the usual GNU/Linux approach, which is to cobble together a disparate set of software components without tightly integrating them.
Member since:2007-01-18
All of the lower level stuff like management frameworks and subsystems definitely matter. A bad kernel is going to result in a slow and/or buggy system overall. However, the kernel is not what users see. Your truly average desktop user doesn't even know what a kernel is. The average linux user might, but even then, what they generally care about is the applications. The kernel and all of the low level packages on a system are things that the user generally just wants to want and not care about. The more techy and geeky a user is, the more they're going to care about it and whatever nice features it may have, but they low level stuff isn't really what the user sees and cares about.
So, while the low level stuff is very important, it's not what users generally care about. What they care about are the desktop applications that they directly use. So, to the average user, management subsystems don't matter - as long as they work well enough not to cause them any problems anyway.
And if OpenSolaris is using the same desktop and applications as a linux distro, then it's as good as another linux distro to most people. There are plenty of people who care about things like ZFS and the various cool features in OpenSolaris stuff, but the average user really isn't going to.
Member since:2005-11-02
Don't underestimate the System. Solaris is, yes, just another POSIX OS with the same X, the same GNOME, etc.. But, where Linux is schizophrenic, Solaris is not. This may seem like a minor detail, but it results in a sometimes very different system. FreeBSD is similar for a lot of the same reasons; though it is different from Solaris it is similarly dissimilar from Linux, because it isn't schizophrenic and has a coherent design from bottom up through... not the top, but close to it.
So, OpenSolaris may at first blush seem just like another Linux distro, but the different details of its underpinnings allow it to be sometimes saner, sometimes easier and sometimes better. And, sometimes, it's worse.
There is very little in Solaris that could not be cloned by Linux, even not counting specific technologies like dtrace. What can't be cloned is the process, the control, and the cohesiveness.
Member since:
2005-07-08
OpenSolaris is a tightly-integrated operating system comprised of a kernel, drivers, system libraries, management frameworks, and other technologies.
...which is a tiny portion of all the software installed in a common distro, and pretty much all desktop software doesn't really care about "management frameworks" (except everything about hardware management, which is abstracted properly in HAL/DeviceKit). They care about basic POSIX operations. In fact they don't even care about that, most of them can run/will run on Win32. The fact that many FOSS apps are so portable shows how irrelevant kernels have become - there is nothing on linux or solaris or any other kernel that "ties" the app to that specific kernel and makes impossible to port the app to other systems.
At the end of the day, what you have is the Firefox/Evolution/Nautilus/Openoffice GUI. Users press buttons and the apps do something. There is nothing special in kernels these days that make the buttons better, and they can't improve sucky aplications either. The last time I saw kernel changing something on the desktop was with the nautilus "snapshot" functionality that only works in ZFS systems - and that can be emulated with LVM and the corresponding NT equivalent...