[OpenIndiana-discuss] I figured this deserved a separate thread

[Frank Middleton]

On 11/04/10 12:04, Rthoreau wrote:
> <snip>
>
> You could probably make a list of features that were only in OpenSolaris
> and now in OpenIndiana that people must have. On any list at one time it
> would of been ZFS and for some it still has a big place in the
> community.

Wouldn't robustness count? Solaris, on SPARC, at least, stays up for
months, even years at a time. Only extended power failures cause it
to stop and even then it comes back quickly and gracefully (well,
at least now with ZFS - no more fsck). RHel, Fedora, Ubuntu, and
MSxxxxx are much more likely to fail - a few weeks of uptime is
enough to merit a celebration. I can't vouch for BSD but I doubt
the other Linux flavors are any better than Fedora even if they
are an improvement over MSxxxxx.

Another feature is performance and scalability. The competition
doesn't come close. What is saddening is all the problems one
reads about with X86 BIOS and also the grub2 fiasco. It makes
you really want to stay with SPARC even if Oracle seems
uninterested. Maybe someone at Hitachi is listening :-).

Finally, backwards compatibility. Solaris really shines in this
department. I hope Illumos doesn't lose too much in this area...

I have no doubt that the Illumos developers aim to keep these
"features" at the top of their list. Sun did it pretty well over the
years, now the torch seems to have been passed on. IMO these
are real selling points. Gnome desktop is a so-so reason...

Cheers -- Frank