Ian Murdock Joins Sun 123
RLiegh sends us the second piece of news today featuring Debian founder Ian Murdock. In an entry on his blog, Murdock announced that he is joining Sun Microsystems as their chief operating platforms officer. As he put it in his opensolaris post, this "...basically means I'll be in charge of Sun's operating system strategy, spanning Solaris and Linux." In all likelihood one of his first priorities will be "closing the usability gap" between Solaris and Linux.
What usability gap? (Score:3, Insightful)
GNU tools are on one of the CS's that Sun ships, and I install gnu tools anyways. It's there and easy to use. Sun supports its SunOS well.
Unless Murdoch is reffering to the wonderful "usability" of old and haphazardly done Debian packages, well erm.. let Sun take care of themselves. I like relatively new user-based programs (like, not from the early 90's).
Typed on a Debian Testing machine. Debating to go with Ubuntu..
Re:What usability gap? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What usability gap? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shooting too low, again. (Score:2, Insightful)
Like 97 percent of the rest of the computing world.
Re:Shooting too low, again. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Shooting too low, again. (Score:5, Insightful)
-jcr
Same went for Debian, some actual admins spoke their mind saying they want peace of mind and a stable OS instead of Ubuntu racing, Digg headlining Desktop.
Re:Shooting too low, again. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Replacement Gap (Score:5, Insightful)
I started off as a Linux admin. Today I am a Solaris admin and I like it that way. Yeah, some of the user-land utilities could be improved, but overall Solaris is a solid operating system that handles some of our hefty applications admirably. Sun also has the best support money can buy. Our x86 vendor is a pain in the ass and there is nothing quite like your Linux vendor and your hardware vendor blaming each other while you wait to get your problem sorted out.
Shoot for the stars (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What usability gap? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Debian on Solaris? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's an "upgrade" the world can do without. Why does everything have to end up looking like linux? If you want linux, use linux. --if --you --like --Solaris --with --all --those-annoyingly-long-gnuish-options take a look at nexenta. It's got a solaris kernel,
but they've managed to wrap the linux unusability 'features' around it for a really, all around, horrid experience.
Re:Ian Murdock doesn't like democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Who are you to say a football player is less important than a programmer? Typical geek chauvinism. Only our kind of talent counts. The world should bow to OUR agenda (witness the "you shouldn't be licensed to use a PC until you understand how one works crowd). And DAMN IT, Dr. Who is better than other TV, even if everyone else says otherwise. I say so, and I am so smart that I must be right.
You know what though? History has shown that dictatorships and eugenics don't advance the best and brightest, they advance the middle and average. Why? Because every dictator needs the support of a mob. Mobs only support people like them. And by definition, every mob member is on average,well, average.
Re:What usability gap? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Solaris kernel needs a *lot* of work. It has some cool features like D-trace, but don't expect anybody to be able to jump in and write stuff for it since it is very poorly documented. I don't think most Sun engineers know what comments are for. Also, device driver support is poor at best. Opensolaris kernel development looks like it is moving very slowly, with little traffic on their mailing lists. ZFS also sounds like it needs work and may be a bit overhyped. The ZFS code is rather difficult to follow, again due to the lack of any comments or meaningful variable or function names.
With the Linux kernel, I can easily jump in and find what I'm looking for and can easily make changes. The code is fairly well organized and generally well documented.
The command-line tools often are missing many of the features one finds in the Linux tools, like decent help. Manytimes very useful features are just plain missing.
Sun's X Windows also leaves a lot to be desired. At least on Sparc, Xorg is not supported and Sun doesn't have proper working render support as far as I can tell, let alone font support. Also, any open source libraries that Sun does provide are often years out of date, and they don't make it easy to download various source packages. If you want just the kernel code, good luck. Everything is in one huge repository.
For servers, Solaris is generally rock solid. For a desktop system, it sucks badly. Linux generally works, unless you're stuck, like I am, with a POS ATI card on a POS HP desktop computer. The desktop computer only has PCI-e 1x and the only cards that will fit it and drive two monitors are ATI and Matrox. I'd throw it off a cliff if I could and replace it with a computer half the speed with an nVidia card any day. This is better than Solaris, though, which has much worse driver support than Linux.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)