[oi-dev] State of development

[Luca De Pandis]

I think the main problem of OI is not the lack of leadership or man power.

I think the main problem is the focus of this distro.
Making a desktop distribution without any support of recent hardware is a no-
go, because nobody will be interested in a distro that doesn't support KMS or 
WiFi.

Please, don't misunderstand me. Is not an OI fault.
It's like a dog chasing its tail: No recent hardware -> No interest -> No man 
power -> No innovation -> No recent hardware...

Illumos is an amazing platform and i really like OI.
I would use it on my laptop, instead of Linux or BSD.

But, the lack of recent hardware (Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge KMS, Wifi, Card 
Reader, Bluetooth etc.) holds me off to use it on my PC.

For now, i use Slackware64 14.0 with ZFSonLinux kernel modules for my USB HD.

IMHO Illumos will have a bright future on server market, but for now not on 
desktop.

Indeed, SmartOS is a very advanced and used hypervisor operating system.
And it doesn't suffer of the same problems of OI, because the desktop is not 
its focus.

When Illumos will be grown, maybe a new Canonical with the desktop market in 
mind will make a new distribution and will bring innovation in the mainstream 
hardware area.
But, for now, focusing on desktop market, there where the competitors are 
Linux, Windows and Mac OS X that have a large range of supported peripherals, 
without any support for recent hardware and without a company that spends 
money to make new drivers is a suicide, IMHO.


Best regards,
Luca De Pandis



In data martedì 16 aprile 2013 18:29:28, Garrett D'Amore ha scritto:
> I've tried to stay away from commenting on this thread, but….
> 
> The problem with OI is lack of sufficient man power and leadership.   There
> are other problems as well ("vision" is one I referred to in the past).
> 
> But most urgently, to keep OI going, with any kind of cadence, it needs more
> volunteers.  The comments below point to lack of a plan . What's even worse
> than lack of a plan is lack of resources to *execute* a plan.  Release a
> full desktop distribution is *non-trivial*, and the road is littered with
> failed efforts due to insufficient resource, or lack of sufficient
> motivation.  (Nexenta used to have a desktop distro… that's how they
> started before they moved to storage -- the work/payoff ratio doing a
> desktop simply doesn't pay.)
> 
> I'm happy to report that illumos' future is no longer tied to OI's.  But I'd
> still love to see more folks pitch in and help drive it.  As for myself, I
> simply haven't the time to do so; illumos and my own commercial venture
> (not to mention my family!) leave me little time for hobby work anymore.
> :-)
> 
> 	- Garrett
> 
> On Apr 16, 2013, at 6:17 PM, Chris Jones c/o Unixmen 
<chrisjones at unixmen.com> wrote:
> > As others have stated, a road-map outlining planned target dates for
> > releases and updates is definately  needed and is what everyone wants to
> > see. Otherwise, any project can seem stale and inactive.
> > 
> > I have been a long time reader of this mailing list and contact people
> > via email regularly and I know OpenIndiana is far from dead and
> > inactive. But looking at the information and resources on offer on the
> > web, there's not really anything useful that suggests what is going on
> > with the project and where it is heading. And there also needs to be
> > clear information about who is in charge of what in the community. Who
> > is the Project Leader? Who is in charge of development and organization
> > of such tasks? If it is all there in the dark alleys of the internet
> > somewhere, it certainly isn't easy to find.
> > 
> > 
> > Regards
> > 
> > Chris Jones
> 
> _______________________________________________
> oi-dev mailing list
> oi-dev at openindiana.org
> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/oi-dev