OpenSolaris Cures My Ubuntu Woes
While I feel Ubuntu has done a lot for the growth of Linux on the desktop and I still have two computers running the Long Term Support, Hardy Heron in my household, it is time for me to branch out and try another operating system. While a tweaked Hardy Heron runs nicely on the Eee PC and the Hardy Heron Server Edition is powering a headless (no console and no desktop installed) older Dell that I only ssh into, I have grown tired of ATI graphics issues with Linux. While I understand the difficulty of supporting the loads of hardware that Linux does and I realize the manufacturers do not think of Linux first from the driver perspective, I have decided to try another road. With the official release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 a few weeks ago, I decided to give it a whirl.
First things first, I probably would not yet recommend OpenSolaris to just any user, but I am a long time UNIX guy and I am fairly confident a few of the Linux variants are still the best option for many users looking to escape the clutches of Microsoft or even Apple if they are too proprietary for you also. The last two or three releases of Ubuntu have just not worked well enough graphically on a few of my computers. This is largely due to the ATI video cards in some of my computers. OpenSolaris seems to do a much better job of supporting the ATI video card I have, the first test was that it could actually run the screensavers, something Ubuntu would do less than 10% of the time. Was the lack of screensavers a big deal to me? No, but the crashing of applications, the desktop and the beta web browser was. After a week of use, OpenSolaris has worked without any of the aforementioned issues. I simply used the screensaver test to determine how well the graphics card was supported and OpenSolaris performs better job for my computer.
Overall the entire system seems to run more solid and perhaps a little faster than it did with Ubuntu installed. I have run no official benchmarks, but I have not been asked for a week why something was not working on the computer by my son. My Hardy Heron install was a fresh install and I had the exact same issues I had after initially upgrading the system. Within the first day an educational game my son was playing hung, the desktop crashed a few times over the past couple weeks and I was not entirely happy to see that a beta web browser was the officially packaged browser. Yes I am aware I could install another browser, that is not the point.
OpenSolaris met my conditions for the computer in question, good graphics support, office documents support with Open Office, package management with IPS, virtualization possible with VirtualBox and nice entertainment software for the kids. OpenSolaris also has the same Gnome desktop that Hardy Heron has by default and a current but stable Firefox version. With DTrace and ZFS being extra technology perks, I am feeling even more confident on my decision to welcome OpenSolaris into my fold.
I have heard Samba takes some work to get working and for some users that could be an issue for some folks. Also the amount of packages does not come close to Linux, but almost certainly everything that most users would need is there. Besides, I have no problem compiling software if I am trying something out of the ordinary. For the first official release OpenSolaris looks nicely polished and meets my needs without me having to troubleshoot graphical issues. If you have had similar issues as myself, you might want to give OpenSolaris a try. I suspect Ian Murdock, the Debian GNU/Linux founder hired by Sun, is a very big reason for the quality of the release.
