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

[Frank Middleton]

On 11/04/10 17:42, Kevin J. Woolley wrote:

> Speak for yourself -- the only times I have to reboot are for kernel
> upgrades. Those don't happen too often (save for recently, with some
> issues needing patches) -- I regularly have machines with six-month
> and better uptimes.

Well, it could be hardware too. But for whatever reason - memory leaks,
frozen devices, whatever, I find it necessary to reboot or even power
cycle the other OSs surprisingly often. But even the grungiest ancient
PCs seem to keep soldiering along forever when running Solaris. To
be honest, I pretty much run Solaris everywhere now; maybe the
other OSs have improved in the last year or so but updating them
is so difficult (or impossible without re-installing) in comparison.
  
> Solaris is a great OS. It doesn't need people pissing on everyone
> else's to be good.

Absolutely. But for it to take off it has to be better than good. My point
only was that for reliability, scalability, backwards compatibility, and (I
forgot to mention) upgradeability, it simply can't be beat. As just another
Gnome based desktop OS, maybe it doesn't have any particular advantage,
although IMO the pkg system beats apt and yum et al for ease of use and
with ZFS it is so easy to roll back. These aren't features you can easily put
in a list along with a better analog clock :-) and have their roots in  an
architecture that's hard to replicate. If we can't compare it to other OSs
aren't we lost before we start?

On 11/04/10 12:04, Rthoreau wrote:

> I see your task is possible but I see a few concerns and would counter
> with the question.  What is unique that OpenIndiana offers that is not
> available in another OI or OS distro?

Just trying to add some answers to that...
  
Illumos and OI have a great heritage to maintain!

Cheers -- Frank