Over the years I've come to love and loathe the web, it's technologies and it's chaos. As with any evolving (in the darwinian sense) technology, there'll always be situation where your desktop environment just not (yet) provides what is needed to consume the leaves of a particular technology (no I'm not a vegetarian).
So what does actually work for me with my mostly standard opensolaris install from the point of view that I'm mostly a consumer of opensolaris?
browsing: firefox 3.5.7 works great. however, firefox is delivered with the OS distribution. Not much of a problem since I suck up the bits from the /dev repository, but still out of sync: What if a critical vulnerability arose in firefox? I'd be stuck waiting for new bits from /dev, which come about every two weeks, but that would put my window of vulnerability at a worst case of two weeks. Ideally, the mozilla foundation would host a pkg server which would allow you to suck up their freshest bits. setting up a pkg mirror is increadibly easy, I doubt they'd have a hard time dealing with the added load. (besides, how much opensolaris clients are out there anyway?).
On a separate thought, If I were to run a pkg server for my own domain with the intent of providing rapid, repeatable installs and updates from various sources, how would I infact provide a single pkg-space comprising several components with components from different sites? Worth looking into.
Generally, the browsing experience is very nice (I can do my work). With flash and java most of my needs are covered. I am very very content with these plugins: it was a long wait, but boy was it worth it. Truth is, I do occasionally run into silverlight components (haven't seen adobe air in fact!) I expect javafx to "just work" actually. In fact just hopping over to j
javafx shows it just works. Video plugins are pretty decently covered by totem, especially if you get some more of those gstreamer-plugins from say fluendo.
Coming back to the point I made earlier:
fluendo provides for it's own update mechanism:
codeina. Honestly: that ticks me off: I would say it should be a given that the update and install mechanisms should be mostly the same. Any deviation from that is in my opinion a significant barrier to enter. Let's look at the example of the pkg.sun.com/extra repository... For every user, issue a certificate. Expire the certificate once the license policy agreement expires (which is what fluendo seems to do for their free plugin) and Bob's your uncle. No new registration: no more updates. Then again: how would you provide for a "shop" like model where the certificates determine what you can see/download? (As is the case with fluendo and their paid for plugins which give added value on top of the free ones they provide?).
Other plugins which make my life on the web much more bearable: ad block plus, noscript. Good that they stopped pestering each other as well. They just work on opensolaris.
A thing about developing technology in the web 2.0 arena that greatly bothers me is the clash of the various titans in this space: the
facebooks,
flickr's,
google's all add value to the internet for me. However, it seems as if they are hell bent on keeping the other ones out. Mining the user seems to quickly turn to be the priceless commodity (or fool's gold?) they are all after: you don't pay for the service you get, but the costs of running the service are (more than) covered by the knowledge about yourself that you surrender. Make no mistake: your identity or parts of it are monetised and sold off to the highest bidder. The obvious monetization here is targeted advertisement, which is what made google big, but there's more contenders: for a startup, getting to an IPO is a worthy goal in itself (as proven a few years ago now by google)
Google especially seems like a sink/magnet/strange attractor: Lot's of stuff goes in: my blog, my analytics, my rss reading, my mail, but none seems to come out at least not very easily. Ok fair: the degree of openness to the end user at google's products is not so bad compared to others: I read my mail locally via imap (thunderbird). Last time I checked hotmail didn't (but that was a long time ago). I managed to get my google calendar out as well, but do needed to digg around to find the appropriate plugin. There's more stuff that you can get out, but don't tell me it's easy let alone guaranteed.Bottom line: you're lucky if you get your data out, but you'll usually have to have a fair bit of knowledge of the underlying technology.
Come to this: what I like very much are tools who tie it all together: pidgin excels at joining my various identities together: I've got facebook, msn, google chat, company im, and a few more all tied into one neat little interface that behaves by and large the same for each and every protocol. Fantastic: If I were to nominate folks for the nobel prize... (only slightly kidding). Other tools which provide this kind of glue between the various services out there: drivel. gtg. thunderbird. openoffice. And a much overlooked feature of gnome: the clock: providing time, weather for various places around the globe. Haven't seen such a simple solution coming from microsoft or apple. The clock widget on os X does mostly the same, but seriously, I don't need all those bells and whistles, let alone the screen real estate it would consume for three or four clocks with a weather forecast to it. I just want tools that work, do their thing and don't get in the way of me being productive.Various chat protocols exist: facebook had (it changed a few weeks ago) a private chat protocol: they changed: thank you very much. No more hassling to dig up and build the purple plugin which enables facebook chat in pidgin. Kudos to the guys who wrote the plugin: admirable job, but reality is that you always played catch up. (Still goes for msn though).
So what then am I missing? proper support for my ATI Radeon. Not being able to run compiz is a major gripe. My point of view: intel gets it. NVidia gets it. AMD doesn't. Intel's worked hard to align with major opensource projects and I feel it's only fair to say that this will (in my opinion) pay out: support for their latest and greatest cpus: it's already in opensolaris (and I would presume in linux), and not only just the "getting things running" good enough kind of stuff: nope: their work on opensolaris made sure that a lot of the distinguishing features of their cpus are working. To a lesser extent this applies to NVidia as well, obviously with a lot smaller scope. AMD? They insist on chucking a binary over the fence every now and then for linux if you want more than the absolute basic functionality which you can find in the open source driver. It's closed. It won't help you. Rest assured, I'm not inclined to get an AMD graphics card or anything that has AMD in it (think laptop). Not now, not in the near future. It's as simple as that.
Another thing is mono and the development stuff around it (gtk-sharp etc) and quite a set of nice applications like F-spot, tomboy etc which are applications which fill a hole. Posting to flickr is a pain at the moment. gnome-sticky notes are ok, but no match for tomboy. And what about moonlight as an open source silverlight plugin? Honestly, I share the concerns about the entanglement between novell and microsoft and possible consequences if microsoft decided to pull the plug in some form or another (I strongly believe they can, not so sure if they would truly dare to do so). Also the thought of having mono as a first (or even second) class citizen in solaris would make my life a lot easier. I'm happy to run the risk of having to part with the applications running on mono when the time comes. yikes.bitter after all;-)
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