Sun releases Solaris-based desktop software

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That's Solaris/x86

- I'm not impressed by the security argument, since Solaris actually lags on several security fronts. For instance, until recently the standard Solaris installation ran rshd and telnetd instead of sshd; packet filtering is virtually useless, etc.

- 64-bit is a hardware attribute, not a differentiator between Solaris and Linux.

- That "rock solid kernel" doesn't support modern hardware (SATA, USB, etc.), and from my own experience the stability differences are negligible.

- Nobody I know uses IPV6 so it's moot.

- Linux' distributed processing abilities are at least a match for any Solaris boxen I've ever used. Moot.

As for applications, all of the apps I use regularly are developed first for Linux and then ported to Solaris (including big-ticket engineering applications). The only times I need to touch a Solaris machine are when I
a) Have to use FrameMaker (Adobe is allergic to penguins)
b) Have to use an old Meta/Avanti/Synopsys waveform viewer that acts like it was coded in assembler.
That's it.

On the other hand, quite a few apps that I use regularly don't run on Solaris without major dinking around with ./configure -- including Mozilla and Firefox.

It's pretty sad when you have to build all of your own standard utilities (gawk, perl, tar, bzip2, wget, rsync, etc.) just to escape from the thoroughly-borked crippleware that Sun ships. It may be solid, but except for running CDE it's also useless.

Posted by: Yagotta B. Kidding   Posted on: 10/14/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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