[OpenIndiana-discuss] Gnome and the future

[Ron Parker]

Maybe I'm the oddball in the bunch. But I've been running OpenIndiana
as my "desktop" OS on my laptop at work since OI-147 was released two
years ago.  Why?

I don't care about shiny new UI gloss, but I have to have a stable
system. What do I mean by that? One that can run stably without
rebooting until I decide to install a newer version or switch systems
and one that I'm not always having to wade through new non-security
related updates just to keep the system secure. This is why I have run
Slackware off-and-on for a couple decades.

What brought me to OI from Slackware was ZFS. I could completely rave
about ZFS, but one thing makes the point. I have to run a corporate
Windows VM. Even pared down it craps itself every now and then.
Previously this required a lot of pain and getting an approved reload
from IT. Now all it requires is 'zfs rollback
tank/vms/win-7@<however-many-days-ago>' and restart the VM. That's
Winning!

In the meantime I have discovered zones, crossbow and a few other
things I absolutely love. I haven't gotten into dtrace yet, but see a
lot of potential benefit there as well.

All of this said, I'm about to switch to Slackware running ZFS on
another machine. Why? I need the newer faster hardware with more cores
for my job. There is a lack of support for the wireless and wired
NIC's in the newer Dell laptop. I also seem to recall that the install
disk would not fully boot on the system. This was the same reason that
had me switching on and off of Slackware years ago, lack of hardware
support.

I know the core Illumos teams doesn't give a damn about DE or laptop
support (half of them only run OI in VM's on their MacBook Pros) but I
do. Had I the time and Solaris knowledge I would work to get the
hardware support into Illumos, I've written a number of Linux network
drivers over the years and would like to think I could figure out the
superior Solaris internals.

I am very sad about this. There is no reason OI could not make a good
working desktop. It's been fine for my needs for two years now. I
suspect given another 5 years or so we may see such. I just wish it
was today. I don't need GNOME 3, KDE 4, Unity or Ubuntu. I do need
modern laptop hardware to be supported.

By the way I would like to congratulate Nvidia for providing good
up-to-date drivers that work on OpenIndiana. The 30x series has been
wonderful. Docking and undocking works flawlessly. Heck sometimes
suspend works. (Not always the two together though).

And yes, I too spend most of my day ssh'd to emacs'd into remote
boxes, VMs, zones, chroots, etc. But I still need a DE for sanity's
sake.

Love my OI desktop,

Ron Parker