On 05/10/13 02:19 AM, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > more constructive than whinging about it will be to find ways to either a) > make a commercially viable case for it so people can get paid to work on it, > or b) lead a volunteer effort to make this work. I think that without Desktop that is running on the server, I can not sell Illumos based distribution as a server product. That is because small companies and offices expect to have GUI working, so they can log in and possible do something with the machine. I suppose that machine without GUI would look to them as a "blackbox" if there is just command line. There is no desktop per se and server as a product per se. It is the server distribution that has desktop environment and programs for convenience. If I am selling it, I am selling a server. And having Desktop environments on server is nice. Not having desktop environment on server in 2013 is NOT NICE.
I want to be able to run both legacy apps and have compatibility with Solaris 10 in it's zone and that's about compatibility. Apps made for Opensolaris also mostly got integrated in OI. I want innovation in Illumos and to have separated issues of updating desktop and GUI parts and applications from the core OS. Having Desktop environment that aether is started or not, does not stop innovation in Illumos from happening and be used in practice. If Solaris 10 (and 11) is a server operating system (GUI does not hurt server use), then Illumos distribution could not be hurt to have GUI available and not to be stuck in CLI. To me it is strange, why some people that do not care about having at least some desktop on top of Illumos, continuously talking about it? New people coming to the platform FIRST discover "how much cool" GUI is and they dig deeper IF you lure them, to at least try using it for some time. And if they got right info they can get on the ship as users, bug reporters and then contributors. I came from Linux, I were a fanboy. I found better technology, I migrated. On Linux I had everything I actually need, BUT the sense of sanity that Solaris/Illumos have with integrated technologies in one place. Since I too think that putting on server anything BUT Illumos-based distribution , is having not much sense, I want to have server distro on my *laptop* I can use, develop solution and then apply it on remote server. I do not want to use Windows/OSX, VMWare, Microsoft Office etc. (nor have money to throw on Apple etc) I want to be able to have things I use independent from hostile proprietary vendors. Illumos devs could use Openindiana for their development environment and run KVM instead of VMWare. And for running Virtualbox I also need Openindiana. One thing many people do not realize is that because of advanced Illumos technologies, Illumos-based distributions have a potential to be super-desktops in some future. Maybe that IS insane, but I tend to see the future where I use GUI to manage servers and do things I can not do with CLI-only. If Fedora would ditch desktop upon install, and Ubuntu started releasing only server edition without Desktop environment, what would be left of them selling to customers? (Even if server do not run Desktop) What would you show to them on the presentation? Black screen of 1985? I always planned to eventually sell Illumos distro as a server, but I want a customer to SEE it and say: "OK, NICE, whatever". And not: "Oh, no.., whatever". And that is how money could flow. If I have something to contribute back , but without GUI, I don't think it can sell. Anyway, I expect Illumos itself in the OI to include KVM and ZFS disk bandwidth usage scheduling. And for GUI- those wanting GUI should care about that. Including me. _______________________________________________ oi-dev mailing list [email protected] http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/oi-dev
