OpenSolaris 0811-98 Screenshots

When it comes out, I'll try to install it under VirtualBox. Hopefully it will work, the last Solaris I tried didn't.

I liked it, but it was too slow, and brought very little that I didn't get from a standard Linux distribution. I couldn't even get Sun Studio to install, which was the whole point in installing OpenSolaris.

I think that Sun might envision OpenSolaris on the desktop as one of those value-added things they are doing to keep their server customers in the family. If the shop that uses Solaris on the server has a bunch of techs who understand it very well, it makes sense to draw on that pool of expertise for the same company's desktops and give the Solaris techs something they know how to work with.

That seems to be the philosophy behind Red Hat making any effort whatsoever with its own desktop product. They're not looking for desktop business, per se, but giving their big server customers something to use in that capacity if they ask for it, and to keep them in the Red Hat environment (and not tempted to try, say, Ubuntu on the desktop and then possibly migrate servers over to that platform).

My understanding from Jonathan Schwartz's posts is that they want a community to do the work and that they want mindshare. They make money on Solaris support, so the more widespread is OpenSolaris, the more support they sell. It also makes Sun's hardware more valuable (the more users who know the OS designed for their hardware, the more valuable the hardware).