[geeks] Sun a possible takeover target - rumours

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 12:51:02PM +0100, Hobbs, Richard wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> See inline...
> 
> > > More to a different point-
> > >
> > > What could Sun do to fix things up a bit?
> > 
> > Put real effort back into Solaris on Intel to provide a path from commodity
> > crap to the SPARC platform.
> 
> more effort? in what way? Solaris 9 is easily available from sun.com downloads
> for a mere $20 for Intel, and free for SPARC.

I think he means make it better.

Solaris on x86 lags behind Linux and the BSD UNIX systems in
installation, administration, and ease of building applications.

I have tried to deploy Solaris x86 systems, but could not justify it
unless we actually had a Solaris-specific application.

The problems I see with Solarix x86 are:

* its slow, even on SMP, where I expected it to shine
* installation is just braindead compared to the others
* driver support is bad
* graphics driver support is DISMAL

I think for a lot of applications, there just is no compelling reason to
run Solaris.

On SPARC hardware, its a different story.  What I run there depends on a
few factors.  On single-CPU machines with good support, I'll run NetBSD.
Otherwise I'll run Solaris.  Solaris for SPARC even seeme to do OK on an
old Sun SS5.

It's the x86 version that seems to have some troubles.

I don't really see why its like that, since Sun should have the
resources to make things better.

> > Then put real effort into making it more of a desktop friendly OS (a la
> > Linux look/feel).
> 
> Download Gnome 2.0 from the Sun Site if you like the linux "look n feel". That
> should help.

I think really what is needed is better driver support for X, and you
can run whatever X software you need.

IMHO, all of the UNIX desktops are in trouble.  Gnome and KDE might look
nice, but they are huge and slow.

They are also redundant.


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