Desktop OpenSolaris fork OpenIndiana shoots fresh version – Hipster

The OpenIndiana project has opened the gates on "Hipster", its latest release and the first this year, and it includes MATE 1.26, LibreOffice, and more. OpenIndiana is a desktop flavor of illumos, which has been continuing development of OpenSolaris since 2010. In the project's own words about Version 2022.10: Hipster is a …

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Nice, I might spin up a VM with this some day.

Shame it doesn't work well on the Thinkpad, I've been trying GhostBSD on there and funky though it is, it doesn't really handle my monitor setup very well.

[Liam Proven]

[Author here]

> Shame it doesn't work well on the Thinkpad

It really is. I hoped to give it a spin, and for similar reasons. In fact my testbed W520 has GhostBSD on it, too. I had more joy with a standalone (non-dual-booting) install of vanilla FreeBSD 13.1 on my old T420, the i5 model with no GPU. It's getting it to dual-boot cleanly that proved tricky for me, and in the end, I didn't like any of GhostBSD's tweaks.

There's a lot of manual work getting a desktop up and running. There's a post-install script that automates some of the process, but it does it by pulling bleeding-edge code from Git, resulting in something that both needs as frequent updates as any Linux distro, _and_ which you can't update using the normal methods. The worst of both worlds!

The Hello System may yet get there, but for now it feels a bit sparse and unfinished.

There doesn't seem to be a happy medium for the FreeBSD desktop right now, which is a great shame IMHO.

[TVU]

OpenIndiana = nice Solaris without the Oracle and Larry bits.

[Anonymous Coward]

!lbits

Larry bits... You've conjured an image I must bleach from my mind!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if it only still ran on Sparc

Thanks to Larry, a lot of nice Sparce h/w is now available at cheaper prices.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Now if it only still ran on Sparc

After much deliberation, SPARC support was carefully dropped from illumos-core not long ago, since the shims for it weighed down development with no practical way to test for breakage. Somewhat like kernel support for 32-bit-only CPUs before it.

OI deliberately uses the "vanilla" illumos-core so...

You might like Tribblix however, they did aim to continue SPARC support so effectively git-reverted the removal in their illumos fork.

[Sudosu]

OmniOS

I have been running OmniOS pretty much since it came out as my ZFS NFS file server for my Proxmox (previously ESXi) hosts.

Most solid OS I have ever used and the upgrades are very straight forward.

I think I even did an in place conversion from the old commercial version to the community version without incident.

It is a bit twitchy about what hardware it will recognize (especially SATA controllers) but once you get it going it will be trouble free for ages.

I went from Solaris to Nexenta (which was fine as well but had a limit on the free install) to OmniOS due to my expanding storage needs.

[Mockup1974]

I'd really love to see a review of this. How would it compare as a desktop to Linux or BSD? Presumably much less software and hardware support, but would it still be viable?

[katrinab]

More specifically, is there any reason why you would choose it over FreeBSB? zfs used to be the reason, but FreeBSD’s support for that is now very mature and stable. zfs on linux is probably stable now, but not quite so mature.

[jimklimov]

Quite viable - was my desktop for 7 years in last job. Unfortunately due to corp restraints - as a VM under required Windows, which had VPN access and such.

Still run one at home (also as a VM though, due to indeed HW incompatibility that I did not have time to rectify as I needed a working machine fast).