Linux or Solaris?
I used Solaris on SPARC as my primary desktop OS for eight or nine years, and I agree with all of the other posters who indicated that Linux is a far superior daily-use desktop. I switched to Fedora for my primary workstation OS about a year ago, and would not contemplate going back to Solaris. That having been said, Ish did say he’d already used Red Hat for a while, and that this was going to be for play, so why not go ahead an load Solaris 10, at least long enough to play with some of the nifty features? Zones look neat, and maybe ZFS will come out before you get bored. To answer your specific questions: 1) hardware support is crappy when compared to Linux. 2) If by build, you mean “compile”, it’s no harder in most cases. If by build you mean “use a package system to install”, it’s MUCH harder. There’s nothing as cool as apt/yum available on Solaris. You can of course use SunFreeware to grab pre-compiled versions of most simple apps, but for
Solaris 10, even the x86 port, is pretty picky about hardware. Not super restrictive, but picky. Rock solid, more than linux can ever be, but picky. Keep that in mind. Building apps written with Linux in mind isn’t too hard, in most cases, and you can usually find a pre-built binary package to save you the effort. Solaris, like FreeBSD, has a Linux ABI kernel module. You can run most Linux ELF binaries natively, but if you’re running commercial software that way, you won’t get support from the vendor for it. If you have some disk space, you really ought to try it out. Solaris makes a perfectly good workstation, even though people like jaded claim otherwise; there’s an official port of just about any useful software package out there, and I think Sun even stopped shoving the CDE down your throat now.
It’s been a couple of years since my primary desktop was Solaris, but back then I found pretty much everything important was available at sunfreeware.com. It was all very nice. That was on Sun hardware though. Back then, the x86 version (2.8 I think) was a bit flaky by comparison. I hear it’s better now. Hardware support is of course still not going to be anywhere near as wide as in Linux. I’ve had no problems with compiling my own projects on both Linux and Solaris. Most software that makes even the slightest effort to be compatible with more than one system should be fine.
Oh, Solaris x86 has come miles and miles since 5 years ago, For one thing. It actually works now (I remember the abomination that was Solaris 2.1; then there was Solaris 2.2, The Solaris That Never Existed; 2.3 sucked too; 2.4 Also Never Existed; 2.5 and in rapid succession 2.5.1 Wasn’t Too Bad … and so on) Yes, the hardware support can be a little fussy, but that’s because it’s aimed at stability instead of support-everything-under-the-sun (no pun intended).
Grab ye a copy of Belenix, which is a LiveCD OpenSolaris distro. You can play with it without committing to anything. OpenOffice is indeed available for Solaris x86, as is Mozilla and darn near anything else you’d care for. Visit Blastwave for almost all the packages that you’d care to install from the open source world. Solaris certainly will provide you with a useful computer, provided you are willing to learn a different package management system, filesystem structure, service management mechanism, etc. However, it’s a great way to get your toe in the water. Hell, you can even make the new system dual boot and have your cake and eat it too.
