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:2005-10-05
Compression, pooled storage, snapshots and encryption(?) are nice, but not a must have for the average poweruser.
All of these features are great things that I would love to toy around with, but you said it, not even your average power user is going to make much of a deal about them. Will be very nice once btrfs matures a little bit more and I can play with such features more easily in an environment that I am comfortable with.
Member since:2005-07-08
Checksumming of your data is vital. Ever had data corruption? Is your data still ok? how do you know there is no silent corruption? In that case you really want to know which files are broken and which are not.
No, checksumming is not "vital", specially considering that self-healing, which is the big deal about checksumming and detecting corruption, requires to downgrade the size of your hard drive to the half, and desktop users won't accept that. The fact is, most of desktop people (which these days upload big portions of their personal data to the "cloud") don't suffer data corruption. The few desktop users that have data corruption many times can afford losing the data (in my experience), and for rest of the people that loses important data there's always a lesson to learn: backups. (remember: checksumming and self-healing are just a great way to avoid the need of a backup restore, but not a backup)
The fact is that hard drives are not the unreliable thing that you seem to want to think. Most of people needs to buy a new computer before they hit data corruption. If drives aren't safe people won't buy them, and the market will choose the drives from the best company. So most of the people just doesn't have problems with that. Obviously, it's a great and much needed addon, but a requirement?
Member since:2005-07-11
Why would you have to cut your storage space in half in order to gain the benefits of self-healing and error detection? Or are you talking about single harddrive setups?
Member since:
2007-04-29
Checksumming of your data is vital. Ever had data corruption? Is your data still ok? how do you know there is no silent corruption? In that case you really want to know which files are broken and which are not.
Compression, pooled storage, snapshots and encryption(?) are nice, but not a must have for the average poweruser.