[OpenIndiana-discuss] switching from Ubuntu

[Nikola M]

On 11/ 7/17 01:34 AM, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Greetings All,
>
> I have used many operating systems over the years and lately have been
> using Windows (all flavors) as well as Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, Gentoo,
> etc...) bu mostly have been using Ubuntu 16.04 as my desktop for some time
> now.
>
> Currently, I am gearing up to do a couple of projects which have the
> Illumos base which are in the SmartOS arena, but it made me start to wonder
> if I should also consider loading up OpenIndiana Hipster as my desktop so
> that I can become more familiar with it as it seems to have many
> similarities as SmartOS and wanted to get the opinion of the OI community
> as to what they thought about it as a day-to-day OS?
>
> Mostly just exploring the possibility of nuking Ubuntu in favor of
> installing OI for a while to see how it runs.
>
> Any comments, experiences, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Firstly , Openindiana is the distribution name because /hipster 
(lowercase) is not OS/distribution name, but a repository name.
I welcome you to illumos distributions, Unix-derived family. (It is 
truly derived from Unix and not just Unix-like)

Openindiana is a server-oriented UK-hosted OS that have a desktop. OI 
has 'snapshots' twice a year (not a releases per se, since they are not 
supported to be updated as such like in Ubuntu) and in the meantime 
there are contiuous updates of fresh and 'vanilla' illumos updates and 
the effort of contributors in 'userland' source repository to make it 
better, more bug free and add fundamental features, where Alexander 
Pyhalov is standing out together with all other important contributors.

Having a MATE desktop, Firefox ESR and LibreOffice (from SFE 
repository), Openindiana is enough for everyday use of internet services 
and using Solaris zones (those might end up hosted in the illumos based 
cloud), but it is sure that some device driver support might lacking or 
trailing behind  a bit.
You can also bootstrap Joyent SmartOS userland and use it in the window, 
using pkgsrc packages, separately installed, in the terminal emulator 
and have it together with OI desktop experience. There are also Boot 
Envornments on top of ZFS that makes both testing and production use 
more reliable and predictive experience etc.

So you can count on frequent and inclusive experience, that would demand 
of you to be more included in the development of the OI itself, not only 
by posting bug reports or driver support requests, but it could also 
allow you to be more directly involved (and more appreciated) then in 
some other distributions you could. So it's both exciting and fulfilling 
experience to use it and make it better.
Don' take anything by the letter , be free to openly (and publicly!) 
collaborate with others and everything you do will be important.