[OpenIndiana-discuss] No longer using OI Desktop

[Hans J Albertsson]

On this note, does anyone use FreeBSD/PC-BSD as a desktop?

Hans J. Albertsson
>From my Nexus 5
Den 4 jun 2015 11:00 skrev "Jonathan Adams" <t12nslookup at gmail.com>:

> Just a note to say that I have stopped using OI on the desktop, and have
> moved to the "backup" system of Ubuntu on the laptop.
>
> OI Hipster no longer worked well with Firefox provided on the Mozilla
> website (every time a dialog box appeared there was a 50% chance it would
> crash, and a 100% chance if the mouse cursor went near it), and the version
> 24 in the repository didn't run flash at all, so I couldn't use the
> Enterprise Manager from Oracle.  I got around this using Martin Bochnig's
> version for which I was very grateful.
>
> The Mozilla provided Thunderbird suffered the same issues as Mozilla
> provided Firefox, dialog boxes kill it (file attachment to emails was an
> instant death, "open with" the same) and the OS provided Thunderbird core
> dumped without starting.  I could get around the file attachment by
> dragging and dropping from the file explorer onto the message, I could live
> with the "open with" by letting it use the default application (which
> didn't work) then picking the files up from /tmp in the correct
> application.
>
> The Adobe Reader 9.3 core dumped instantly.  I know that evince works well
> as a PDF viewer, but since I work with Electronically signed documents;
> Adobe is the only graphical application that deals with these correctly.  I
> worked around it by not checking any signing of the document.
>
> There is no longer a working Intel graphics driver, although I could get
> around this by removing the driver and running in vesa with the
> 915resolution program.
>
> I started to play with making the ubuntu partition work better with our
> network and settings, getting sccs, autofs, openldap relication, etc. etc.
> working, and in the process of mounting my zfs root (to access the /etc
> directory of OI) I managed to stop a working BE from booting, meaning that
> I was forced to use a BE after the upgrades that broke all of the above.
>
> Consequently, Ubuntu died on my laptop during an system upgrade where it
> decided to uninstall the Intel graphics and disk drivers (would have been a
> serious win for beadm btw) and rather than trash the computer and all the
> settings I bought a new internal drive to copy all of my files.
>
> My laptop was dual boot on an 80Gb harddisk.  I bought a new 1TB harddisk
> (was wondering about SSD, but felt that if I wanted to run Illumos I'd be
> better with spinning rust because of TRIM) ... I thought about the issues
> as stated above ... and I installed just Ubuntu on it.
>
> I feel a little guilty about it, like cheating on your first love, but I
> don't feel guilty about the 25 second boot times (as opposed to 5 mins) or
> the fact that I can run programs without them crashing.  It also allows me
> access to more updated versions of software, and versions not available on
> Solaris (chromium, etc)
>
> I'm still keeping OI on the servers, ZFS root FS, Virtual network
> interfaces and Zones are brilliant, and no OS can compete, but I have
> decided to give up on the desktop.
>
> Thanks for reading this.
>
> Jon
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