OpenIndiana is a free and open source Unix operating system derived from OpenSolaris and based on illumos.
Curmudgeonly software reviewer Dedoimedo AKA Igor Ljubuncic reports:
Conclusion
I find the test today somewhat sad. Sure, I did accomplish what I needed, but it gave me no joy, and no hope that this operating system can even even remotely compare against any Linux. Even CentOS is lightyears ahead. In the server environment, it may have its uses, but it completely misses the mark on the desktop.
Package management, applications, it all just feels raw, alien, unfriendly. What do you do if there are problems with drivers, or hardware? Where do you find the latest apps, and this isn't just an act of mercy by a volunteer? What about compatibility on actual hardware. The fact I was not willing to commit my test laptop also tells something.
You can master and tame OpenIndiana, to a level. But it is mostly a futile exercise in obstinacy. All of the stuff we've done above are more or less a given in Linux, and have been so since about 2007. It's like driving an old car and trying to match its abilities to new, modern technology. Unless you're into antiques, it's not really worth it.
The worst part, I guess, isn't the specifics. That can be sorted. It's the absolute lack of progress since 2011, in the desktop space. Underneath it may be wonders, but if you cannot use the system, then it's worthless. Lots of the stuff from the previous version have been removed [or] made less accessible, but we get nothing new in return. So it is nerdier and harder than before, and that's a grim sign of a future that has no place on the desktop. This seems to be true with other operating systems in this family, too. Just not worth the effort. Stick with Linux. Grade wise, 4/10.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @08:28AM
So this is an operating system for hipsters? Or maybe only for hipsters from Indiana?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday June 19 2017, @08:37AM (29 children)
His descriptions make the OS sound somewhat like how Slackware felt to me after nearly 2 decades of debian - it was as if in 2016 being user-unfriendly was considered a feature.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Shimitar on Monday June 19 2017, @09:27AM (3 children)
Outside the bushes, how may BSD users still alive?
I am a hardcore unix lover myself, and i have given up on anything else since the last 10 years for Linux, and i am not regretting it.
To be honest, anything non-linux like is quite dead today.
(Unfortnately, this does not hold true for Windows, but it should)
Coding is an art. No, java is not coding. Yes, i am biased, i know, sorry if this bothers you.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @07:23PM (2 children)
We use it on some of our large file servers. The unholy speed and low load you get from using sendfile() on FreeBSD seems unmatched by most alternatives, including the same call on Linux. But other than that one use case, we use Linux on servers. There is some debate about transitioning to all Linux or all FreeBSD, as the cognitive struggles are increasing as they (well more of their low-level ecosystems) diverge with time.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 19 2017, @11:39PM (1 child)
Adding insult, last time I checked the emulation of the Linux syscalls for running Linux binaries on that OS is actually faster than running them on the native thing.
Kind of reminds me of another test where Linux and Windows were compared side to side for some task. But the Linux hardware were at least half as powerful as the Windows one. It still run in circles around the Windows junk ;) The explicit article and details can be found deep into the archives of the green slime site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @12:01AM
Linux [still ran] circles around the Windows junk
Might that have been the first game that Steam ported to Linux?
(Left 4 Dead 2)
https://m.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/02/valve_games_faster_on_linux/#content [theregister.co.uk]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Monday June 19 2017, @09:30AM (7 children)
There's more to that. I've actually run OI for awhile on an older laptop; it's very similar to running a non-x86 version of Linux as your desktop.
A lot of the problem was that beside hardware compatibility issues, you had to deal with things like poor GL support, weak at best wifi support, no Bluetooth, and a somewhat swiss cheese package library. Now granted. I don't like the direction Linux has gone from either a kernel or userland perspective for years. I personally jumped from Ubuntu to Gentoo, but I was seriously tempted to completely get off the Linux boat if viable.
Still always moving
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Shimitar on Monday June 19 2017, @09:47AM (6 children)
Old time Gentoo user here.
To be honest, all this fuss about SystemD, PulseAudio, Network Manager and so on does not touch "us" Gentooers too much. Gentoo proves it can be done "the linux way", which means with freedom. You can use one or all of them, or just avoid all of them with no problems on Gentoo.
The direction where Linux is going is "nowhere". Or better, it is NOT where Ubuntu and Redhat are driving toward. Linux is not "going" somewhere... Somebody is driving to oblivion, somebody else is missing the point. Desktop is going to die... Soon(er) than anybody expects, there will only be "power users" who will either use Windows/MacOSX or Linux, which will not care or know how to avoid the mess you are talking about. The rest 95% of people will be happy with tablets and phablets.
The "future" of linux is Android(*), which is much worse than SystemD.
(*) until Google will remove the Linux kernel, which is in the works.
Coding is an art. No, java is not coding. Yes, i am biased, i know, sorry if this bothers you.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday June 19 2017, @02:01PM (1 child)
I doubt the desktop will ever fully die. The more likely scenario is a (oh jesus im about to use a buzzword, forgive me lord!) convergence of the tablet and desktop. Instead of a dedicated desktop, a tablet would allow a wireless keyboard and mouse, probably bluetooth, and use wifi to stream it's screen to a larger monitor, probably a TV or desktop monitor.
The other scenario is the PC AT* formfactor dies off and we move to bookshelf style PC's like the Mac Mini or raspberry pi. We already have such high levels of integration that the SoC has made discreet PC components mostly obsolete. Plug in the little box, hook to a monitor and you're finished. There will be a point where the divide between GPU and CPU will be gone and all we will have are APU SoC's. So long as there are high speed I/O ports like USB C and no locking down of the firmware (e.g. locked to secure booting windows/android/fuschia only) I am fine with that.
The future of Linux is server side web/iot/cloud/container/buzzword. It was never going to make it to the desktop because it has and always will suck at that (And I 'm a Linux/*nix/plan 9 fan).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @12:41AM
Yeah??
M$ has dropped the ball so many times that nobody pays them any mind any more WRT mobile.
Apple split desktop and mobile.
Ubuntu dropped Ubuntu Touch in their recent rejiggering.
A group has picked up that but their website is such a complete mess that I don't know how they expect to accomplish anything.
They don't even have dates on things on their site. [ubports.com]
Tizen is going nowhere fast and doesn't seem at all interested in convergence.
In the future, is everybody going to be running Google's stuff?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday June 19 2017, @05:01PM (1 child)
And regarding Linux' growth and future, I feel that Linux is a bit like kudzu - it's going in whatever direction seems easy for it. Some big companies with big budgets are able to invite it to grow in their field, but that doesn't mean linux has moved there, only that it's expanded there. If Evilcorp starts to kill bits of it that aren't in their field, then that's something to start worrying about. In a way, the attempted assassination of sysvinit was one of those things. Fortunatly Gentoo's rootstock is hardy.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @12:53AM
plan on getting Gentoo
I'm surprised The Mighty Buzzard hasn't already chimed in as he has before.
Must be fishing.
Calculate Linux [soylentnews.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday June 19 2017, @06:09PM (1 child)
The problem is the Gentoo learning cliff.
As much as I do like Gentoo, I got off it originally for Ubuntu because I don't get a lot of enjoyment with constantly fiddling with my system. Installing a system with Ubuntu and my preferred DE of the time took about an hour. Setting up Gentoo from stage3 and setting up Cinnamon with my app set is more like a 1-2 day job.
If someone would make a distribution that dumped most of the crap I hate about Linux, but kept the things about Ubuntu I liked, I'd probably jump there.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday June 19 2017, @11:42PM
What is the crap you hate about Linux?
And what is that you really like?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Monday June 19 2017, @09:48AM (14 children)
Actually, *Solaris* wasn't a Unixalike, it *was* Unix. And Solaris was never BSD-based. SunOS (okay Solaris 1.x was, but no one ever called it that except Sun, it was always SunOS) up through 4.x was BSD. Solaris 2+ (SunOS 5+) was completely different code based on SVr3 and later migrated to SVr4.
I went and actually read TFA (thanks _gewg, I can never get that time back). The "reviewer" appears to be pretty much a lightweight when it comes to Unix and Linux. His complaints about OpenIndiana mostly stem from his lack of knowledge and experience with *both* platforms. From TFA:
X/xdm/ configuration seems beyond this guy.
Doesn't want to use the command line? I've been running OpenIndiana for a while and WRT functionality and dependency management, the package manager works just as well as debian (apt) or fedora (yum/dnf). What's more, significant updates autmagically create a snapshot that can be rolled back in case of problems. Thank you ZFS.
Lovely. Not only is this guy clueless about OpenSolaris, he's clueless about ZFS on Linux [zfsonlinux.org] and snapshot support in same, including Ubuntu [ubuntu.com] (crap that Ubuntu is).
Just about the only valid gripe this guy has is hardware compatibility. But then, that's always been an issue with Solaris, Open or otherwise.
I'd tend to agree that OpenIndiana is better as a server platform, but it's a serviceable desktop as well, with some limitations.
Yes, few developers host OpenSolaris binaries. However, given that GNU and Clang dev environments run just fine on OpenIndiana, anyone with half a clue should be able to get most software packages running if they aren't already available in the package repository [openindiana.org].
Reviewer [dedoimedo.com] rating: 1/5, dumb as a box of rocks.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Monday June 19 2017, @10:01AM (1 child)
OpenSolaris had some patches to GNOME that integrated ZFS snapshots into the file browser to give a clean TimeMachine-inspired GUI. Were those patches upstreamed and made to work on other ZFS systems? (Honestly curious - I've never tried using this stuff on FreeBSD, but it would be nice if it worked there).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday June 19 2017, @10:07AM
Honestly, I don't know. However, the "reviewer" seems unaware that ZFS (and by extension, snapshots) is available on most flavors of Linux. This guy seemed to think that just because there wasn't a GUI, the functionality didn't exist. Sigh.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 19 2017, @12:42PM (4 children)
"Doesn't want to use the command line?"
When I "reviewed" Solaris, years ago, I felt much like this reviewer does today. I didn't understand much about *nix OS's, and despite the fact I knew my way around DOS, *nix was quite different. I was lost for a long time. It's hard to say at what point in my own learning curve it was, when I tried to use Solaris. I was beginning to get comfortable with some of the Linux cli, but I wasn't "there" yet.
I know that I had a GUI desktop, but after all this time, I can't even remember which desktop it was. I do remember that it was clunky, and disappointing. Suse Linux Gnome had prepared me to expect great things from a *nix desktop. Whichever Solaris I was diddling with was so very far behind the curve, I would have been embarassed to demo it for anyone.
I'm in the camp that says Solaris was a pretty good server, but not the best. And, it sucked as a desktop.
I may download the new OpenIndiana, just to see how it looks. But, I'm not rushing to do it this morning.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Monday June 19 2017, @01:43PM (3 children)
If it was Solaris as opposed to OpenSolaris, it was likely Sun's crappy "OpenWindows" [wikipedia.org] which was hated (and rightly so) long before Linus Torvalds was in college, or the marginally better, but still crappy, CDE [wikipedia.org].
But things have changed, especially with Illumos/OpenIndiana.
OI actually defaults to Mate [wikipedia.org] (based on Gnome2), which is decent enough. It can also run the aforementioned CDE and, I believe, OpenWindows (if you're that masochistic). But it also supports Enlightenment [wikipedia.org], Openbox [wikipedia.org] and other windows managers as well.
I've also heard tell that some folks have gotten xfce running on OI too.
Bash is also available, in addition to the default csh.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday June 19 2017, @06:39PM (2 children)
The first Unix I used back in about 1993 was Solaris. I remember one of the machines on the network was enormous. It had 128MB of RAM. I ran some home made FORTRAN on it. I used to love the OpenLook Window Manager and in 1995 when I installed Slackware at home for the first time, I used olvwm [wikipedia.org]. My 100MHz Pentium was slightly faster than some of the Sun 4u boxes I'd used at university.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Monday June 19 2017, @11:58PM (1 child)
People seems to completely have lost sight of computer resources these days. That a CPU clock at 33 MHz, DRAM 32 MB, harddisc 100 MB, x86 arch with VGA is sufficient to boot and run X11 window seems unfathomable for people these days. I'll guess even Netscape v1 would run on top of that, perhaps even Netscape v2 (the first decent one). To insult even more a computer platform with a CPU clock at 7 MHz, DRAM 512 kB, storage 880 kB, m68k arch with bitmap and acceleration handled a window based GUI.
With this knowledge it become much easier to judge how much computer resources you need for say a embedded system with a graphical user interface. Which means that if the user interface only need to be some kind of really dumb graphical terminal you know with quite a certainty you can get it done with say a ARM at 8 MHz, SRAM 512 kB, Flash 512 kB, storage with flash 1 GB and DMA trick to drive the display. Which means it can be squeezed down to ONE chip which saves circuit board routing, EMI and complexity by a magnitude. The all graphics can be sent as vector commands down some serial line like Ethernet etc.
So when modern computer have "minimum" specifications of a CPU at 4 GHZ with 4 cores, DRAM 4 GB, storage 200 GB or more using 64-bit x86 and closed to hell graphics. You KNOW something is up big time.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 21 2017, @05:15PM
I forgot to mention GEOS, that does window interfacing using a 8-bit CPU at 1 MHz, bitmap graphics, 64 kB of RAM and 160 kB of storage. How sucky does that indicate the Microsoft code is..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @01:02PM (1 child)
To be fair on the guy, no has /had/ to do that in a mainstream Linux distro in the last 10 or so years (unless you consider "apt-get install xdm" doing X/XDM configuration).
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday June 19 2017, @01:14PM
Fair enough. Although that's not strictly true unless you configure a graphical environment at install time. However, it was (and still is) trivial to switch from runlevel 3 (multiuser/text) to runlevel 5 (GUI) (or the 'systemctl set-default ' systemd equivalent).
I installed OI (and then upgraded to "hipster", which, unrelatedly is stupid name!) quite a while ago, and while I do remember having to manually configure starting the GUI at boot time, I don't remember exactly what it was I had to do. I do recall that it was trivial (at least for me).
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Monday June 19 2017, @03:06PM
Maybe my prejudices are showing, or maybe the people I know are a skewed selection, but I have always associated the BSD users with the more server (and often headless) computer users - most boot to a console, rather than a display manager - and hence my comments about more familiarity with that environment. But yes, the guy apparently doesn't know what a runlevel is, and shouldn't be given too much credibility.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday June 19 2017, @04:26PM (1 child)
He's not as stupid as this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=447820 [ycombinator.com]. This idiot tried using plan 9, a clearly labelled RESEARCH operating system, in a production environment. Then is dumb enough to rant about it in public.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday June 19 2017, @05:01PM
As Einstein is supposed to have said, "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
I guess there's a reason he's hailed as a genius. :)
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @01:14AM
No sweat, dude. 8-)
The "reviewer" appears to be pretty much a lightweight
(Subsequent comment by you)
This guy seemed to think that just because there wasn't a GUI, the functionality didn't exist
Yeah. He wants everything to be simple and to work out of the box.
Done right, criticism can be a Good Thing(tm).
Even when done wrong, it can sometimes garner useful comments.
I've also got something in my personal queue that I'm hopping to get submitted about an outfit that is seeking to help FOSS projects with UX improvements.
OpenIndiana is better as a server platform, but it's a serviceable desktop as well
Now, see. If I hadn't submitted this drivel, we wouldn't have gotten your insightful rebuttal.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by tbuskey on Saturday June 24 2017, @12:54PM
Most of these reviews of Linux/etc releases are about the desktop, not the OS.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @01:31PM (1 child)
SunOS was BSD based, but Sun felt they had to go SysV in the 1990s, and that became Slowlaris.
To me, SunOS was the benchmark Unix that Linux aspired to: When hacking Makefiles and configure scripts to get software to compile on Linux, SunOS definitions provided a good starting point.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Monday June 19 2017, @03:02PM
Sun and AT&T developed System VR4 jointly. I went on a couple of Solaris courses many years ago - Kernel Internals and Networking Internals - which were very interesting. The problem was that there was a hard core of Solaris kernel engineers whose egoes were so big they couldn't see Linux. Linux soon caught up and raced ahead.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Monday June 19 2017, @06:33PM (3 children)
Quite a few years ago I rescued a pair of Sun Ultra 80s from a skip. They're identical, with four UltraSPARC IIi 450MHz CPUs, 2GB RAM and Creator 3D graphics. They had Solaris 8 on them IIRC, and put a Solaris Nevada (Solaris nv/11) development build on them. The idea was I'd be able to keep my Solaris skills up to date, have a diverse target on which to compile code (64-bit big endian RISC vs 32- bad 64-bit little endian CISC) and I was kind of half thinking about getting involved with one of the efforts to port Slackware to SPARC. Anyway, Oracle decided that SPARC users shouldn't get free/open versions of Solaris to play with and as for doing any porting work, I ran out of time. They still sit gathering dust.
It's really good to have diverse hardware and software platforms on which to compile. It finds many latent bugs in your code. This is worth remembering as the world consolidates around ARM and x86-64. You really should compile on a big endian machine too.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday June 20 2017, @12:02AM
ARM is dual endian asfaik. So it should be possible to compile the code as big-endian and run on any ARM?
(Score: 1) by Deeo Kain on Tuesday June 20 2017, @12:52PM (1 child)
The last CISC Intel processor was the Pentium-MMX. Starting witn Pentium-Pro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro [wikipedia.org] Intel's CPU have used a RISC core
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday June 20 2017, @01:33PM
Yes, but the ISA visible to the user is CISC with variable length instruction codes and very lax requirements about code and data alignment with respect to word boundaries. RISCs were typically very fussy about these things. The difference in the layouts of the object code and data would often show up bugs in your code.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ilsa on Monday June 19 2017, @10:02PM (2 children)
Who is this reviewer and why should I care about his opinion? He clearly doesn't know jack about Solaris.
He basically did the equivalent of, "I'm driving this mac truck but it's crap cause it's not a car!"
Why does everything have to be "for the desktop"? Solaris isn't a desktop operating system. It was never designed to be a desktop operating system. It's a server and workstation operating system. Installing OpenIndiana to run desktop apps is like trying to use an MRI machine to find a screw you dropped on the floor.
How stable is it? How's the ISCSI support? How is ZFS performance while sharing files over NFS? Has ZFS features kept up feature parity with what's been doing with ZFS on BSD? THOSE are relevant questions. The only thing this blog writer did was prove how little he actually knows about operating systems outside of his little Dunning Kruger cave.
Hell, the single most value important question, whether it worked with systems that use UEFI, he *intentionally skipped*. The last version would only install on systems older than Haswell (I think it was Haswell... Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
We wanted to use OpenIndiana to run a NAS but we chose to abandon it because we couldn't install it on even vaguely new-ish hardware.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday June 20 2017, @12:07AM (1 child)
All very good points. Perhaps the most important is that it's a server operating system and workstation secondly. GUI stuff is more or less a convenience not a goal (I think). The dead give away is the collision with the command line. Essential to any professional operation. And this "had to type startx", it's a good thing because if the machine mounts your disks and then automatically starts the graphical environment only to crash repeatedly. Automatic start of graphical environment will not be a good thing. Not to mention the security implications.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:39AM
Exactly. I wouldn't dream of setting up any my system any other way than boot-to-command-line and startx to get X. Boot-to-graphics is infantile.
(Score: 1) by tbuskey on Saturday June 24 2017, @01:28PM
As a desktop, he may be right. Linux took up the desktop innovation back when KDE was developed as a response to CDE and Gnome was a response to KDE's non-open source at the time. I was a Solaris admin from 2.3 up to 10 & OpenSolaris. I did OpenWindows and used FVWM2 instead of CDE back then.
Below that, apt vs yum vs tgz vs Solaris' packaging is part of the distribution. Solaris' packaging & patching has never had a dependency wrapper like deb/apt and rpm/yum. The early days of rpm didn't have yum either.
ZFS is truly worth having IFF you have 2+ drives. If you're doing it on a single drive, you'll lose access when the drive errors and ZFS can't fix it from parity. I've used ZFS since Solaris 10.3 and had servers running it with OpenSolaris or ZoL since. The auto snapshotting was initially done in cron. I don't know why the time slider hasn't shown up in the other OSes.
Zones - better containers than LXC IMO. Joyent ported KVM to run inside a Zone. So you could run Linux Chrome inside a Zone. Solaris has a branded zone at one time, but development stopped.
dtrace - dynamic realtime debugging. What systemtap wants to be when it grows up. You could run a Linux app in a zone and dtrace the zone to get info you couldn't get in Linux.
http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/pages/lksf_content.html [c0t0d0s0.org]Lesser Known Solaris Features details other Solaris-isms you might not see elsewhere.
It used to be all the Opensource got developed on the system(s) you had and onto SunOS. Often, it was only SunOS. You had to port to get it running elsewhere. When Solaris came out, it never gained the ubiquity of SunOS. Eventually, Linux was where development happened and everything else had to get ported.
If you're running a desktop, you want graphics acceleration, sound, video (codecs), web browsing, maybe flash, your development environment, gaming. All of that is on x86 Linux. It's harder to find flash, codecs, prebuilt binaries for a Raspberry Pi or BSD or Macintosh. Even Windows. OpenJDK isn't on Windows; you need Oracle Java. More specifically, that stuff is in Ubuntu apt repos. Some things might only be in rpms, but if you're looking for something a bit less mainstream, it's a .deb.