[OpenIndiana-discuss] openindiana more popular

[Alasdair Lumsden]

On 4 Oct 2010, at 02:57, Allan E. Registos wrote:

> The current effort must be on the stabilizing of the platform. Gaming support in Linux is poor, how much more for this early release of OpenIndiana.

Solaris isn't really a gaming platform. The focus of the operating system development has always been on making it work on enterprise servers first and foremost.

ZFS, Comstar, Zones, Crossbow, SMF, FMA, DTrace are all server features, and very strong reasons to use Solaris in favour over Linux/BSD/etc.

Some of the development of OpenSolaris did go into modernising the desktop and making it work reasonably well, but probably with a view towards running enterprise desktops on SunRay clients, or for developers/sysadmins who primarily use/target Solaris on their server platform.

Plenty of open source games will run fine on OpenIndiana, games written with OpenGL or games that use X. But the underlying kernel hasn't really been designed with gaming in mind.

OpenIndiana will continue along the same development lines. The focus will be on concentrating on what Solaris does best - run on enterprise servers. We'll certainly put a lot of effort into the desktop as well, as a lot of users do run it on desktops. But gaming isn't really something we will be focusing on.

If you asked me to rate the suitability of platforms for playing games from best to worst, it would go along the lines of: Games Consoles (PS3, XBox, Wii, etc), Windows 7, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, NetBSD, OpenBSD.

There is a big gaming Linux community and I'd imagine for Open Source developers/evangelists interested in gaming should probably focus the efforts there.

To quote Scotty from Star Trek, "How many times do I have to tell ya! The right tool, for the right job!" :D

Cheers,

Alasdair