I decided to have a play with Nexenta today, which is basically Ubuntu with an OpenSolaris kernel and GNU userspace.
The installer is a bit clunky, but it’s about 10,000 times better than the standard Solaris installer. To be honest there’s not much to distinguish it from regular Ubuntu once it’s installed.
It has all the usual applications and a reasonably complete apt repository (although my preferred text editor isn’t there). My main problem with standard Solaris is that maintenance is difficult because the package management system just isn’t up to scratch, which Nexenta fixes with the addition of apt. It’s also nice to have a (mostly) GNU userspace. However the thing I like most about standard Solaris is the good config tools provided which make it easy to, for example, create a software RAID array in just a few clicks – Nexenta doesn’t include any of this and half of the GNOME config tools included don’t work (Nexenta is still in Alpha, after all). I don’t know if Sun are even opening their config tools (just like they’re not opening their hardware drivers — this is drivers FOR THEIR OWN HARDWARE!) but I hope they are…
But if OpenSolaris looks and works like Ubuntu, why would people not just use regular Ubuntu? Especially since Ubuntu just got ported to SPARC with the assistance of Sun. Sure there’s DTrace if you’re a developer, but desktop users and sysadmins aren’t going to care about that.
While it’s nice to have another Free Software OS/kernel (even if it isn’t GPL-compatible) I suspect it’ll be mainly of interest to existing Solaris users – certainly I can see nothing to convince me to switch to it (either on desktop or servers) at the moment.
