[oi-dev] Resignation as OI Lead

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2012, garrett.damore at dey-sys.com wrote:
>
> So then, I have just a single question:  What is the compelling 
> reason for doing all this effort?  Why not just load up Ubuntu on 
> your desktop (or buy a Mac, or even run *cough* Windows) and run 
> illumos bits in a VM?

This position you advocate is a very low-performing one and not very 
reliable either.  It is much better to run the inferior OSs in a VM.

The so-called "desktop" is a way to interact with the OS using a 
graphical interface.  It is not necessary for it to directly support 
idle social applications like "Skype".

On hardware I have here, I find OpenIndiana's "desktop" to be quite 
performant.  I also find Solaris 10's aging "desktop" to be quite 
performant.  I find the "desktop" to be less performant on Linux 
systems like Ubtuntu because the focus there seem to be to consume all 
available resources with new effects and exotic graphics which do not 
contribute to getting things done.  It has not taken me long to learn 
that Ubtuntu is so frightfully complicated that its developers do not 
quite understand how it works, and they have not even resolved the 
long-standing randomly-occuring bug that the system ignores requests 
to shut down and reboots fail to properly initialize the audio device. 
I have also had Apple hardware and OS here but it suffers from issues 
particular to Apple's social culture (which bears some resemblance to 
Oracle) and it is difficult to recommend that someone depend on it for 
long term use.

Current OpenIndiana is satisfactory for most things that I need and it 
only lacks ready-made packages for Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, 
and the available Flash plugin.  If detractors do not get in the way, 
forward progress will resume, and these packages will surely appear.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/