DistroWatch has a very good article summarizing the state of running OpenSolaris on the desktop at the moment. Personally, I’m interested in Solaris technology seeing more widespread usage although am not a gigantic follower at the moment.
For me the most interesting part was their discussion on what is happening with Nexenta, a project to graft the power of the Debian/Ubuntu userland on an OpenSolaris foundation. To me this seemed like one of the more promising projects since the mental overhead of relearning a whole bunch of new commands drops by a large factor and I can focus on really grokking the parts that make Solaris unique and not get too involved in the other parts until I feel good and ready to dive in.
Currently, Nexenta has decided to step away from the desktop and focus on the server backend which I think is just dandy since most of the features that OpenSolaris touts are more appropriate for the server at the current moment. (ZFS, Zones, Xen) and I think it’s worth getting these tools integrated in seamlessly without too much fuss.
Currently, one of the annoying things that I had learned when trying to play with OpenSolaris is that some features that get a bit of press require following bleeding edge of OpenSolaris which requires learning to keep track of basically trunk for a distribution. (For example trying to play with Xen is something that requires more recent builds of Open Solaris). While there is something to be said for learning things from following trunk. It can be a little frustrating when you also want your computer to actually do some work outside of sending bug reports and searching forums / mailing lists / blogs for ‘How do I get X working’
