brainstorms

Friday April 22, 2005

a worthless solaris review...

slashblot desperately needs some class. it just linked to a zdnet uk "comprehensive" review of solaris that is essentially a page-long hit-and-run incident. i refuse to provide a link to this junk, but here is the scorecard, in case you were wondering:

Features 9 Setup & ease of use 3 Performance 8 Service & support 7

so at 6.8 do we get a thumbs up or thumbs down? does the computing community deserve a wagging finger of shame [thanks roger] for being so shallow?

(2005-04-22 07:17:33.0) Permalink Comments [5]

Comments:

What would have made the review better? A more detailed analysis of why Solaris 10 still isn't actually worth using? Or were you just after a higher score?

Posted by Anonymous on April 22, 2005 at 11:58 AM EDT #

mark twain once observed that he was fortunate not to like onions; otherwise he would have to eat that distasteful vegetable. he was making fun of people like you.

Posted by oz on April 22, 2005 at 01:57 PM EDT #

The score for "Setup and ease of use" sounds just about right given a lack of drivers for any modern motherboard, chipset, or graphics card, e.g.: NForce 4 boards, ATI or NVIDIA with native OpenGL, sound cards, etc. The list is endless. It may be a great OS but it lacks drivers and that's probably going to kill Solaris x86 in the end. Mind you it's not entirely Sun's fault but it's moot, without drivers only a few people are really going to run it. Lots of people may download Solaris but how many are actually running it?

Posted by Anonymous on April 22, 2005 at 03:59 PM EDT #

I hope we can find a way to capture real useful data from anonymous reports of failure and half-baked reviews. S10 hardware support is orders of magnitude beyond any other Solaris release. Sound and graphics are fine on my Sony laptop, no problems on Dell GX280s with SATA controllers which are not supported under some common enterprise linux distributions and (of course) Sun Sparc and AMD 64 Workstations. Of course, just because it works on my machines doesn't mean it works on everything, but just because it doesn't work on your machine doesn't mean it won't work on a good percentage of enterprise class hardware.

Posted by bnitz on April 22, 2005 at 08:01 PM EDT #

dear anonymous (2): i replicated the scores for humor; i hope you agree that our industry and our systems deserve better than these nebulous, simplistic score reductions.

i understand your point and agree about the importance of drivers. some missing drivers will make solaris less desirable for some environments and users, but i honestly do not know what to expect in the long run. solaris/86 is continuing to surprise many people.

Posted by oz on April 23, 2005 at 01:10 AM EDT #

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