After another 6 months have passed we are proud to announce the release of our 2021.04 snapshot. The images are available at the usual place. As usual we have automatically received all updates that have been integrated into illumos-gate.
The major changes are new versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, multiple NVIDIA drivers to choose from, and a lot more. For those unaware, OpenIndiana is a distribution of illumos, which in turn is the continuation of the last open source Solaris version before Oracle did what it does best and messed everything up.
Wow Solaris, there is a name I hadn’t heard in years. And can someone please tell these distros that a decent website design really wouldn’t kill them? I mean its 2021 yet most of these distros act like its 1993 and everyone is still on dial up, would a few screenshots in the “What is” page REALLY be so hard to add?
https://www.openindiana.org/documentation/gallery/
Two clicks. 😉
But, but … the last published screenshot is from 2016 version ! And look, it is not as flat as our republican Earth!
😉
Uhhh…those are 5 years old, that would be like me putting up a screencap of Ubuntu 4 and saying that is relevant in 2021. I seriously doubt they have changed absolutely nothing in 5 years and I know that MATE has done some major changes in 5 years and who knows what the distro maintainers have done to the UI to have it fit their needs.
Sadly I don’t think its changed *that* much. The development is slow due to lack of developers, I mean they’re screen shots, I’m not sure how many people decide to use or not use open Indiana based on what tweaks to the looks of mate. I’d guess less than 10.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
That’s the funny thing about consumer mentality where something looses merit if it doesn’t constantly change. No new theme in 5 years, boo! Haha.
In earlier days of computing changes were genuinely revolutionary, but increasingly these days we’re seeing changes that tend to be unnecessary and sometimes even counter productive just for the sake of change. Businesses-wise it can be commercially necessary for things to change whether or not the change brings meaningful progress.
I actually think this idea that “change equals progress” could be particular to our time in human history. The past century or so humans have experienced so more technological progress than the sum of all of time before us, this makes us kind of special. I don’t want to fall victim to center of the universe thinking, but I really do wonder if our period ~1900-2100 will be historically unique for the very fast rate of technological progress not only looking back but also looking forward. Progressive changes may well slow down indefinitely once the low hanging fruit gets picked. Barring major new discoveries in physics, I get the feeling that future changes could be far more incremental than revolutionary.
Ok this replaay os meant for Alfman but for some reason osnrws will not let me reply to mime (nesting depth maybe) so I’ll reply here. The thing about consumers or end users is that they don’t read release notes unless they check for a specific issuer that they care about, So if things don’t change in obvious ways it’s easy to fall into thae trap of belevibg that nothing has happened and thus the project might have stallet. it’s allsso easere for the tech press to lach onto oi or major prowser versjoin changes, so unsurprisingly those are the ones (appart from really serious security issues ofc) that get reported
As someone who has been giving Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla an extended run (for the sake of giving it a fair hearing) on one of my two main laptops, but who otherwise feels much more at home on *BSD/illumos/Solaris, I’m of two minds:
On one hand, I agree with you in the sense that posting fresh screenshots for each new release, or at least updating them a little more frequently, would be “picking the low-hanging fruit” in terms of marketing.
On the other hand, I think you’re making an apples-to-oranges comparison by equating a 2016 OI screenshot with a 2004 Ubuntu screenshot. (A Ubuntu 16.04 screenshot would have been apples-to-apples, and still relevant to your argument, though a far less dramatic comparison.)
At the end of the day, OI has an interface that is much less of a moving target than Ubuntu, and thus hasn’t really changed since 2016 despite your disbelief. Ergo, a five-year-old OI screenshot may still be entirely relevant in 2021, even if from outward appearances it comes across as laziness on the project’s part. In fairness, however, even a five-year-old screenshot of Ubuntu is not relevant in 2021 given the tweaks that have gone into the GUI, let alone having moved from Unity 7 to Gnome 3.38 in that time.
I haven’t had a chance to give the latest OI a test drive yet (though the iso is downloading as I write this), but I’m totally okay with the desktop staying more or less the same, and I suspect most of OI’s target audience is as well. OI and Ubuntu represent two completely different mindsets and sensibilities. While I’m not naturally a Ubuntu kinda guy, I appreciate the role it plays in the OS marketplace, and can understand the need for its desktop to move at a different pace than more visually-staid alternatives like those in the *BSD and illumos worlds. (Conversely, I’d like to say Oracle Solaris may have shot itself in the foot by moving to Gnome 3 as of 11.4, but at this point I’m not sure Oracle even wants Solaris to survive past its current support obligations, and thus I don’t think that OS has any feet left to aim at. A pox on the house of Oracle!)
1993? That’s a bit harsh, it’s solaris so I’d say more like 2003.
Most probably didn’t really experience the Gnome side of Solaris until 2004 or after as well. With that said, it’s still going to be a dated UI. For me, and I think others, Solaris had lost it’s “desktop” edge and had become more of a server OS by then anyhow.
I was reminiscing about Interleaf 5 though the other day…. thinking about cool dead things….
I’ll take that over the bloated useless garbage for websites that are the case more often than not nowadays or the Apple-esque minimalist useless garbage.
0brad0
Some of y’all haven’t recovered from the shock of not having to dial up to see them interwebs…
I have tried OpenSolaris 11 when still it was from Sun Micro Systems. I was impressed by the Gnome Desktop environment, the integration of time slider in Nautilus is very impressive. I hope they have retained this great feature.
So the biggest change is updated Firefox and Thunderbird ? What about the OS / kernel updates ?
The OS/Kernel is based on the Illumos kernel, which is basically the slightly patched source base for the last opensource release of solaris 11. It has been rather stagnant, and I think most of the activity in that distribution is in the updating of userland packages.
It’s basically a legacy project with a few maintainers.
Omnios may be the only other solaris distro with some activity:
https://omnios.org
Spam ^
is this also spam?
Just informing you know. And if it is not spam then there is something fake about it.
/s
In related news:
Illumos ends SPARC-support.
https://github.com/illumos/ipd/blob/master/ipd/0019/README.md