Billly Gates's Journal: Switching to Solaris x86 as my destkop

I still consider myself one of the fallouts from FreeBSD 5.x searching for my os of choice.

As many of you know I am not exactly pro Linux (or gnu/linux according to the Stallmanists).

I like the BSD's and I also believe Windows has improved tremendously over the years, while Linux has gone downhill. Especially this is true in userspace applications. Many zealots refuse to see this trend and get all angry when more and more Windows2k3 installs replace Linux and Unix ones. Many in IT want standards and that is Microsoft.

Still Windows a nightmare to administer and I am not a pro-MS zealot. Windows is still desktop oriented to me compared to UNIX.

  As for Linux, I will say it was a great OS back in the days when Allen Cox was Linus's right-hand man and the kernel was 1/15th the size of 2.6. The number of applications that core dump is huge. Maybe no one has time to debug the apps? But I don't have this problem under other operating systems. This is what I mean by instability of Linux. Sure the kernel is still somewhat stable but what if Inet starts doing strange things? Your system might as well be down.

I discovered http://www.blastwave.org which contains thousands of ported apps to Solaris. I found out that solaris10 is fully supported on my system according to the HCL, and even has support for my ipod mini and my sans cruizer 512 Meg stick. Sweet!

I just downloaded solaris10 and plan to burn it to some cds in a few minutes and take the plunge. I am hoping Solaris is as good as FreeBSD with great documentation, simple rc scripts in /etc, and perhaps some sample files like FBSD had in /user/share/examples that I can use.

I am also excited that its Linux emulation is excellent. I have old Linux games that won't run under modern distro's that I hope will run under Solaris. Solaris has support for older versions and tools which would include (Solaris's Linux loader).

Finally I can have an os that wont core dump all my userspace apps. Yes I know it's not the OS's fault for third party applications, but I am hoping this won't be an issue because everyone runs the same distro of Solaris so to speak. Not solaris10 with a different version of libc for example.

I will update and include screenshots.