Designed for server, evolved onto desktop. But I think that it is only in a position of where linux was years ago. I think Solaris/OpenSolaris are great server platfroms. And I'm pretty confident that probably 85% of it either wouldn't work on Solaris or can not be installed at all. I'm sure there are many others, I run a lot of software. And I'm sure we all know my view on having to purchase codecs.Īnother, VLC don't seem to have packages for Solaris either.
Multimedia seems to be fiddly and I guess I could say sketchy. A brief look at Google tells me some people have installed Inkscape but with major issues. Ĭlick to expand.The Gimp and Inkscape for starters. I'd be interested to see a comparison between the platforms when using the same compiler and Java runtimes on all the platforms, but I suspect it'd be a rather boring article. They're somewhat excusable, though, as you could say that Linux is "supposed" to run with EXT3, OpenSolaris with ZFS, and FreeBSD with UFS. And the disk microbenchmarks aren't so much Linux vs OpenSolaris vs FreeBSD as EXT3FS vs ZFS vs UFS. IMO, none of the computational benchmarks presented in that article are valid, simply because they didn't use consistent compilers (or runtimes, for Java). However, I have seen dramatic differences between compilers, compiler versions, and compiler options (IA64 and GCC vs Intel springs to mind.
And this is for a multithreaded piece of software with a fair bit of inter-thread communication, so it's probably far more sensitive to a lousy kernel than LAME (for example).
The numerical program I'm maintaining is portable (and routinely performance tested -a decrease in performance is treated as a bug) across a large range of hardware, OSes, and compilers, and I've never seen any statistically valid performance difference between OSes while using the same hardware and compiler.
So, if an identical-as-possible binary is run on both systems, the change in execution time is almost entirely due to the compiler. Click to expand.Correction: ZFS/Java 1.6.0_10-b33 pwns EXT3FS/Java 1.6.0_0-b12 and UFS/Java 1.6.0_07-b02.įor things like MP3 encoding, zipping, etc, there is very little time spent in the kernel usually <1%.