OpenIndiana 2019.10

On the way back from his detour to BSD-land, Mayank Sharma runs into another promising open source Unix release.

- Mayank Sharma

Sometime after the community took it upon itself to maintain OpenSolaris, it decided to ditch its development tools and processes and created the OpenIndiana Hipster branch to modernise the OS. Hipster is compiled with GCC instead of Sun Studio and follows a rolling release model where the release team puts out installable snapshots around every six months.

What makes OpenIndiana (OI) approachable to new users is that it runs familiar apps on its desktop. It uses the MATE desktop along with its cache of tools, as well as a handful of mainstream productivity apps such as Firefox, Thunderbird and Pidgin. While there is not much to write home about regarding OI’s default cache of apps, one that caught our eye was the TimeSlider app for taking incremental ZFS filesystem snapshots. It isn’t enabled by default but is fairly intuitive to set up and use.