GNOME and Solaris Land

April 29, 2005 4:55 am General

For a long time, GNOME, or Solaris, has been a second class citizen with each other – I’m not entirely sure which way around it should be. As a desktop team it’s been somewhat frustrating having to rip all sorts of features out of our releases on Solaris, simply because we haven’t been able to come up with a substitute for them due to time constraints – whether because they just needed porting to the Solaris API, or because there was no substitute within the Solaris kernel.

Today I started writing that list, partly because of the guilt for not having written it before but also because I believe it would be really useful to have once OpenSolaris is released. I’m also guilty of not dog-fooding GNOME on Solaris a little more, and suffering in my jocks for a while. Hopefully Solaris will get some more desktop focus over the next year or two.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Linux and I believe in the development structure and culture that has been created around the project. I was hugely impresed by Andrew Morton’s keynote at linux.conf.au – many things he said were so very true of the management of just about every software project. I hope the OpenSolaris community can amount to the same.

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