Maybe I'm the oddball in the bunch. But I've been running OpenIndiana as my "desktop" OS on my laptop at work since OI-147 was released two years ago. Why?
I don't care about shiny new UI gloss, but I have to have a stable system. What do I mean by that? One that can run stably without rebooting until I decide to install a newer version or switch systems and one that I'm not always having to wade through new non-security related updates just to keep the system secure. This is why I have run Slackware off-and-on for a couple decades. What brought me to OI from Slackware was ZFS. I could completely rave about ZFS, but one thing makes the point. I have to run a corporate Windows VM. Even pared down it craps itself every now and then. Previously this required a lot of pain and getting an approved reload from IT. Now all it requires is 'zfs rollback tank/vms/win-7@<however-many-days-ago>' and restart the VM. That's Winning! In the meantime I have discovered zones, crossbow and a few other things I absolutely love. I haven't gotten into dtrace yet, but see a lot of potential benefit there as well. All of this said, I'm about to switch to Slackware running ZFS on another machine. Why? I need the newer faster hardware with more cores for my job. There is a lack of support for the wireless and wired NIC's in the newer Dell laptop. I also seem to recall that the install disk would not fully boot on the system. This was the same reason that had me switching on and off of Slackware years ago, lack of hardware support. I know the core Illumos teams doesn't give a damn about DE or laptop support (half of them only run OI in VM's on their MacBook Pros) but I do. Had I the time and Solaris knowledge I would work to get the hardware support into Illumos, I've written a number of Linux network drivers over the years and would like to think I could figure out the superior Solaris internals. I am very sad about this. There is no reason OI could not make a good working desktop. It's been fine for my needs for two years now. I suspect given another 5 years or so we may see such. I just wish it was today. I don't need GNOME 3, KDE 4, Unity or Ubuntu. I do need modern laptop hardware to be supported. By the way I would like to congratulate Nvidia for providing good up-to-date drivers that work on OpenIndiana. The 30x series has been wonderful. Docking and undocking works flawlessly. Heck sometimes suspend works. (Not always the two together though). And yes, I too spend most of my day ssh'd to emacs'd into remote boxes, VMs, zones, chroots, etc. But I still need a DE for sanity's sake. Love my OI desktop, Ron Parker _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
