[oi-dev] OI project reboot required

Fri May 10 11:43:01 UTC 2013

I agree with what Peter and Garrett wrote earlier. OI is lacking a clear
vision. It should be different than other illumos distros' as well to avoid
duplicating work unnecessarily.

I think, OI could be "illumos hacker distro", and:

- carry on providing GUI support, good enough for illumos hackers to use it
on their desktops/laptops
- it could potentially be based on vanilla illumos-gate; few OI specific
changes could be upstreamed or dropped
- existing OI users should be able to do pkg update to get the latest bits

Not radical or innovative at all. Different enough to what other distros
are doing though (no GUI, own illumos-gate forks).

I did a quick survey on IRC and looks like there is enough talented and
capable people who would be willing to help with the model described above.

Existing releng process and contribution process prevent anything from
happening though. I would like to help to change that.

Radical and innovative ideas are welcome as well. They could be worked on
in parallel as sub-projects.

What do you think about OI being "illumos hacker distro"?

Andrzej

On 10 May 2013 03:12, Nick Zivkovic <zivkovic.nick at gmail.com> wrote:

> For what it's worth,  I only need Xorg, xpdf and xterm to take care of my
> graphics needs. Everything that doesn't involve coding happens on linux,
> mac and winxp.
>
> As long as a distro can support Xorg, it is viable for me. So whatever you
> guys do, please don't remove the basic graphics capability!
> On May 9, 2013 7:20 PM, "Garrett D'Amore" <garrett.damore at dey-sys.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> On May 9, 2013, at 4:00 PM, Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > On Thu, 9 May 2013, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Upshot, *today* anyone who thinks there is a commercial future in
>> illumos on the desktop is probably smoking something.  There are a few
>> people who would be willing to pay for it, but it needs more than a few
>> dozen people willing to pay a couple hundred dollars (more often
>> substantially less) to make this a viable and interesting (economically)
>> venture.
>> >
>> > There is little "commercial future" in the desktop for Linux
>> distributions as well yet almost all of them have a graphical desktop.
>>
>> Admittedly true.  And yet, most of them *started* on the desktop.
>>  Linux's roots are in the desktop.  Most of those distros took off because
>> they had a groundswell of support from developer users who wanted it on the
>> desktop -- they didn't have servers, and options like VMware simply didn't
>> exist at the time.  I'd argue that this is largely an artifact of history.
>> I would be entirely *unsurprised* if distro vendors like RedHat and Oracle
>> simply *ditched* their desktop support at some point in the future -- its
>> clear to me at least that folks aren't running those distros on the desktop.
>>
>> In fact, I can't think of *anyone* who's paying for a desktop OS that
>> doesn't come from either Apple or Microsoft.
>>
>> > Availability of a graphical desktop is seen as a requirement for common
>> acceptance.
>>
>> Historically true, but I seriously doubt it now.  SmartOS is the counter
>> example from this community.  I think there are others.  For example,
>> OpenBSD was highly popular for a long time for its security emphasis, but I
>> don't know *anyone* who ran it on a desktop.
>>
>> The widespread availability of virtualization like VMware, VirtualBox,
>> and Parallels means that there is little need to take over the user's
>> desktop to provide a reasonable environment.  Most people these days
>> develop using SSH, etc.  The folks I know who use Linux would, apart from a
>> few extremists, not care whether the desktop ran Linux, FreeBSD, or
>> Solaris, as long as it Just Worked and provided a familiar UNIX-like
>> backend.  (I contend that these principles have lead strongly to the uptake
>> of MacOS in the developer community…. I use an Apple laptop for my own
>> environment, even though I wouldn't *dream* of using MacOS in a server
>> capacity.)  For me, Terminal.app and ssh is along with VMware gives me
>> everything I need for doing cool things with illumos on my desktop.  I
>> explicitly *disable* the graphical login on illumos. :-)
>>
>> >  Much/most of the graphical desktop development taking place for Linux
>> does not seem to be done by the companies which popularly peddle it (e.g.
>> Canonical has been more of a desktop packager except for its useless Unity).
>>
>> Only partly true (Qt is the counter example).  But yes, a lot of the
>> desktop development in Gnome and company is done by community members who
>> are passionate about this. And guess what -- almost all those guys are
>> Linux "bigots".  There's a huge trend in those spaces to adopt technologies
>> that are Linux-specific, to the point of near active hostility towards
>> other FOSS.  That creates a huge barrier for leveraging their efforts.  Do
>> we have the kind of volunteerism here to take up a duplicate effort?  And
>> why just duplicate?  If we have *that* kind of interest and volunteerism,
>> I'd recommend actually doing something *cooler* and better.   Of course,
>> that flies in the face of legacy compatibility….
>>
>>
>> >
>> > The argument about "no commerical future" is becoming worn out and
>> tired since that (commercial purpose) is not why OpenIndiana/Illmos users
>> want to log into a graphical desktop.
>>
>> Worn out and tired it may be, and *yet* people complain about the lack of
>> leadership and progress.  I don't know about you, but I have to pay for
>> housing, groceries, and gasoline (among other things).  So I have to work
>> at things that pay the bills.  I am lucky enough that this maps well to
>> things that are also interesting to me.  Maybe its unfortunate that folks
>> aren't finding ways to make a living at this, so that a developer community
>> will spring up around it.  But 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.
>>
>> The problem with "b" is that its a very large, and often thankless, job.
>>  People spend more time complaining about broken things on the desktop,
>> than they do actually helping fix things.  Individual leaders get
>> exhausted, and move on.  This is a recurring theme in this community --
>> Nexenta desktop, StormOS, AuroraUX, OI, etc.
>>
>> So, it comes, for me at least, back to "a".  Figure out a way to make a
>> commercially viable story so that you keep a small group of developers
>> paid.  Right now, I don't know of any such story, and when I bring this up,
>> the responses like yours Bob, amount to nothing more than putting your head
>> in the sand.
>>
>> Put another way -- even if there were a million illumos users wanting a
>> graphical desktop (there aren't), it wouldn't matter *unless* amongst them
>> there were either the people with the talent and inclination to create and
>> maintain the graphical desktop, or people willing to pay enough money to
>> *employ* someone to do it.  (Alternatively, a business case showing that
>> desktop use is sufficiently important to non-desktop commercial use to
>> justify funding that work.)  To date, none of these have converged.
>>
>> Frankly, none of this is surprising.  Our desktop technology is inferior
>> in substantial ways to pretty much *every* OS (excepting perhaps NetBSD and
>> OpenBSD.)
>>
>>         - Garrett
>>
>>
>>
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