Living With Opensolaris

What I found

So I thought I would give opensolaris a try out. If you have not heard of this before, it is a UNIX based operating system developed by SUN. So the first day I had it, it was all new and I didn’t really know what I was doing. It did take a day or two to get used to it, and after that I loved it. It had so many features built into it that just made it a really nice OS to be using. Some very polished applications such as TimeSlider came in handy a lot. It has the abilty to use some amazing desktop effects, and uses the popular GNOME desktop. When Opensolaris is first installed, everything is just, well, there. Everything runs smooth and fast, it just works.

However, after using this for a week, I also found that there were a lot of things I didn’t like about it. For me, music is very important, as I listen to it a lot, whether I am doing work, or just checking my Facebook. This may or may not have been to do with my hardware, but the sound quality was extreamly bad, and I was not able to listen to any music, online or offline. Even when I got a notification on Pidgen messenger, it would sound really bad. This pushed me away from using Opensolaris a lot, as music is a very big part of me. There were also a couple of bugs where if I tried to save a file in a place of my choice, the whole system would crash, and I would have to take the battery out of my laptop just to restart it. The internet connection would keep going off and coming back on. It just wasn’t working out for me.

You may not have the same problems as I did, it may just be the machine I was running it on. If you want to see what this OS can really do, I would say you should get a Live Disc, and try it out. I installed it on to my hard drive, then got rid of it a week later. I hope you enjoy using Opensolaris.

What OS would be best for me?

Well, this is one of many questions that I am asked and in most cases there is no right or wrong answer. It would really depend on what you want it to do. This may be to watch movies and store music, or a system that allows you to use good graphic editing tools, or a system that makes it easier to develop various applications.

You must first answer this question. ‘What am I going to use it for?’

There are different factors that also come into this, such as the price. The 3 most common operating systems that you will come across are MacOS, Windows and Linux. Do a bit of research on all 3 of these, and you may even find other OSs out there such as FreeBSD and so on.

A bit of information about the 3 then. Okay, well I will start with Windows. This is probably the most commonly used out of the 3, in businesses and also for home use. It will come on most PC’s already, and there are many different versions of it. Some applications on it allow you to watch films, listen to and download music, write documents, develop web simple web pages, and many other things. The GUI for windows is called ‘Explorer’. Over the years this has got nicer, and easier to use. The main advantage of using Windows is that most applications will run on it, as it was the first operating system out there to be sold. There are countless things that it will allow you to to, as more and more applications are being built for it.
However, Windows is well known for being the operating system that can crash often, viruses and many types of Mallware can get into the system. This means that you would have to pay, in order to keep your system secure, as there are many security holes in some of the applications. It is also a good idea to download a more secure web browser if you will be using the internet, such as Firefox or Opera.

Now let’s talk about the MacOS. Out of the 3, if I had the choice of an OS, this would be the one. Unlike Windows, this only takes up 8GB of hard disk space. Later versions of Windows can take upto 20GB or hard disk space, so the MacOS is a really neat and compact operating system. It doesn’t come with any trial software pre installed, or any of the junk that you don’t actualy need. It comes as it is, and can be used straight out of the box. There are features on the MacOS that allow you to store and play music (iTunes), you can store and view photos (iPhoto) and these are all part of the iLife software packages. This OS runs extreamly fast, providing good care has been taken. The software itself comes very cheap, but buying a Mac Book could cost over £1000. This is where Windows beats it in price. Overall, if you have the money to spend, and you want a really nice OS that will allow you to do virtualy anything, you should get a Mac.

Now finaly, Linux. I would say that our of the 3 operating systems that have been discussed, this one stands out the most, and for many reasons. This might actually sound too good to be true. First of all, Linux is free!. (Yes thats £0) You can get a copy of Linux virtualy anywhere, online, buy a disk, in the back of a magazine, or even on a memory stick. This is becasue it is OpenSource. It is free, you can edit/modify it, then have your own copy of it to give on to others. The next best thing about Linux, is that there is no actual Linux Operating System. There are hundreds of them, and each one of them has its own purpose. For example, there is the most commonly used one, Ubuntu. This is known to be extreamly user-friendly, and easy to use. Then there is Damm Small Linux. This is a very small version that only takes up a few MBs! In my experiance, the one that I would use is Linux Mint. Infact, this blog is being written right now on a copy of Linux Mint. It originates from Ubuntu, so has all the same user friendly tools that Ubuntu has. Again, like all linux distros, it is free, and open source. Easy to install, and easy to use.

I could go on for ever talking about these, but there is just a breif overview of what those 3 operating systems have to offer. I hope this has helped.