Alfred Peng's Weblog: The life with OpenSolaris and Mozilla

This topic is a little bit arguable.

Solaris is a great OS for server market. It was secure, stable, fast especially on SPARC. And for now, it's still cool, not only the released Solaris10, but also the developing Solaris 11. We're proud of the cool stuffs in our Solaris: the kernel debugging tools--DTrace; the virtualized operating system environments--Zones. So do we still need to compare it with Windows or Linux? I think the answer is YES. We have two different sets of customers. One is the enterprise customers. Not only a secure, stable kernel, but also user friendly, easy to use/config desktop system are what they want. Another set is the developers/users. Most of the users in China are familiar with the Windows system. Some of them may have been in the Linux world for sometime. To migrate to Solaris, the first problem they'll meet is how to find the alternative applications. GNOME helps some of the Linux users. And for the Windows users, it's still a problem.

The following is the list for the application pairs with the similar functionality:

Internet Explorer ---- Firefox(firefox)
Microsoft Outlook ---- Thunderbird(thunderbird)/Evolution(evolution)
Microsoft Office ---- StarOffice(soffice)
Winamp ---- Rhythmbox Music Player(rhythmbox)/Realplayer(realplay)
Photoshop ---- Gimp(gimp)
Word Pad/notepad ---- Gedit(gedit)
Instant messaging ---- Gaim(gaim)
Windows Explorer ---- Nautilus
Windows Picture ---- Eye of GNOME(eog)
MIRC ---- Gaim(gaim)
Media Player ---- Totem(totem)/Realplayer(realplay)
金山词霸 ---- stardict
中文输入 ---- SUN PINYIN
Acrobat Reader ---- Evince(evince)
flash player ---- flash player

The aboves are the bundled applications. Beside those stuff, there are also lots of unbundled applications which are useful: xchat, mplayer, nvu... Want to have a try? Come here