[OpenIndiana-discuss] Not proposing a flame war ...What are the pros in favor of hipster

[Alexander Pyhalov]

On 11/ 9/16 03:04 AM, Harry Putnam wrote:
> I am so far from knowledgable about the differences between the
> various Solaris branches is the only reason for asking this question.
>
> I'd like to hear a bit about the pro's of hipster as compared to
> Solaris 11.3.  Maybe a few pointer showing where the real differences
> are and what they mean.
>
> Maybe a bit about how well either one is supported, too.


Hi.

For me the greatest advantage of OI is that if something doesn't work,
I can try fixing it. And when I don't know how I should fix it,
I can ask others and they are likely to help with issue.
Also, as I'm mostly interested in Solaris-like open source desktop, OI 
is the evident choice here ;) As for general server solution, things are 
not so bright here.

S11 is closed. More to this, it's Oracle product. It's bad enough for us 
to avoid it in any possible way. I think nobody here (at any of my jobs) 
will never even consider opportunity to deploy S11-based solution (it's 
much more ridiculous than using Oracle DBMS in newly-written application).
If we want commercial support for unix-like OS (which is very unlikely), 
we have OmniOS for Solaris-like OS or RedHat for Unix-like OS.

I don't understand why I should pay support fees for unix-like OS just 
to get updates. I can use any other open source unix-like system to get 
free security updates and minimal necessary support (reaction to bug 
reports). Actually we use Debian/Ubuntu and a bit OI.

S11 has a lot of technologies which we don't have, for example, it has 
OpenStack support, Docker support, kernel zones.

In my opinion, lately, illumos doesn't bring a lot of superior features, 
it's more like 'S11-beta-on-life-support'. Support for new devices is 
added, a lot of ZFS and DTrace work is done here, some work to enhance 
API compatibility with Linux/BSDs is done, but I can't name any 
ground-breaking technology which appeared here in last 2-3 years and is 
not present in Linux/BSD world.
As for other open source unix-like OSes, we can see successs of Docker 
and containers in linux world, rise of systemd, perfect ZFS support in 
FreeBSD. So, if OpenSolaris in 2010 clearly had a lot of advantages over 
other OSes, now if we compare illumos and Linux/BSD world, this 
comparison will be not in favor of illumos.

However, if we look at other distributions, we can see LX zones support 
or Docker support in SmartOS. So, if they go upstream, we can at least a 
bit compete on feature side with S11 ;)

If we compare OI to other major illumos distributions, OmniOS and 
SmartOS, the thing we lack most of all is stable releases. I'm sure that 
we provide more packaged software than OmniOS, but we can't compete with 
SmartOS pkgsrc. However, you can use pkgsrc collection on OI. Note, that 
OI ships pristine illumos-gate, so we lack some base system features, 
which are present in SmartOS or OmniOS (such as LX zone support).

Briefly: if you need general Unix-like OS, illumos-based solutions or 
S11 can be not the best choice. If you need ZFS storage, you hardly find 
anything better. If you need something S11-like, but free, your choices 
are restricted to OI and OmniOS (or SmartOS if you want good 
hypervisor). And if you want commercial supported general-purpose OS, 
you'd better look on RedHat, OmniOS or S11.
-- 
Best regards,
Alexander Pyhalov,
system administrator of Southern Federal University IT department