Most of the new generation of window managers appear to assume that every box contains a 24 bit framebuffer, probably accelerated. This simply isn't true of Sun hardware; 24 bit was an option on most of the workstations and an expensive, rarely purchased one at that.
AfterStep for example, needs a mass of colours for its beautiful icons and shaded backgrounds. True, you can select nogradient options and obtain reduced colour icons from the net, but it still uses substantially more colours than OLVWM.
This is a big problem on 8 bit displays, especially when you have Netscape trying to grab all 256 colours. Indeed, some of the AfterStep Apps won't even run unless sufficient colourmap entries are available. This results in several large gaps in your wharf (the docking area) on startup.
I suspect little will ever be done to address this. 8 bit framebuffers are an endangered species, rightly so, and there will be little incentive to sacrifice slick look and feels for the sake of legacy hardware. It effectively means though that the current surge of new wave window managers coming through can have little visual appeal to SPARC-based users.
AfterStep itself remains a subtly unreliable application. I often lose the focus, both for keyboard and colours. Restarting cures this, but it happens just often enough to be annoying. The latest version, 1.5 (get it from RawHide), is a massive improvement on 1.4.5 but is still in beta. It shows.
I'm still not entirely comfortable with AfterStep. There are too many elements compared to a simple window manager like OLVWM: five icons in the window titlebars alone. And I miss being able to click on any part of a window's border to bring it to the foreground. I realise that virtually every aspect of it can be customised but honestly, who's got the time? I could have downloaded and compiled the OpenLook distribution in the time I spent fiddling with AfterStep's configuration.
The question that may be levelled at me is, if I had so much difficulty with AfterStep, why didn't I try another of the plethora of available window managers? I've browsed the home pages for several and in truth, most of them look similar to AfterStep (the buttons on the titlebars are a giveaway); there was no evidence that any of the comparable alternatives would address the shortcomings of AfterStep. Nor was I prepared to step back to something like TWM.
We're getting to the heart of the biggest issue facing Linux on the desktop today: ease of use. If someone like myself has difficulties (I've configured a fair few desktop systems in my time), ghod help the naïve user moving from Windows. Maybe WindowMaker and KDE are better, but what I've read of each suggests not yet.
To be fair, AfterStep has some enhancements over older window managers, such as sloppy focus and the wharf. Possibly not enough to make me persist though.
Netscape is the largest and one of the most significant applications that I depend upon so its presence under S/Linux was essential. (You can use the SunOS version, but you need to grab the libraries from somewhere and again, I didn't have the time.) Fortunately, Netscape released an unsupported S/Linux-glibc binary of Navigator 4.5 around the time I decided to change over. Wonderful!
Then I discovered that it consistently core dumped under RHL 5.1. Returning to the S/Linux mailing lists, I eventually found out that it relied upon a vital bug fix in glibc that wasn't present in the version shipped with Red Hat. Fortunately, a later version could be downloaded from the RawHide distribution.
(Note: RawHide is where Red Hat puts RPMs (Red Hat Package Manager) of the most recent package versions, for users who like to live on the bleeding edge. It turns out that unless you want to live in the stone age (i.e. last week), you pretty much require one or more of the RawHide updates to gain the neat stuff.)
Once that was installed, Navigator ran up fine. Colour mapping was hopeless, but I resolved to put up with colour flashing while using a private colourmap (although the colours are still occasionally wrong). It wasn't stunningly fast, but then Navigator never was.
Then the miscellaneous issues appeared ...
As it stands, Navigator is reasonable for day-to-day browsing but iffy on anything more complex. Today, I had to run it remotely on the Solaris server so I could purchase some books online.
In my real life, I'm a musician or at least a drummer. My SS5 doesn't have much bearing on my musical activities, but I do occasionally like to listen to a CD and play the odd MP3 or WAV. The CD side is covered, no shortage of players there (although I don't know of any that support internal SPARC CD audio under S/Linux). Listening to samples in S/Linux is harder. The main obstacle is getting sound card support in your kernel.
The kernel shipped with RHL 5.1 (2.0.33 - how old??) doesn't include the sound modules. Neither does the official 2.0.35 update. Again, you must return to RawHide to download a recent 2.0.35 kernel with the sound modules (as a bonus, it also supports Energy Star monitors).
Then you'll find that sndconfig identifies the SPARC audio hardware correctly but won't play a sample and generally acts weird (I'm being vague here because I couldn't see the display owing to colourmap problems). Playing samples directly seems to work OK, although brief experimentation showed that the sound module would occasionally fall silent when stressed and require restarting.
For MP3s under Solaris, I used mpg123 with which I was happy enough. Unfortunately, while it supports Sun hardware and Linux, it doesn't directly support the combination. I tried compiling it with OSS enabled but it claims not to find any supported rates on the chip, which is a lie. I haven't been able to hunt out another MP3 player (or at least one that doesn't require additional UI libraries I don't have). To date, I can't play MP3s under S/Linux - pointers welcome.
There appear to be some poor interactions between Solaris NFS servers and Linux clients. My SS5 freezes occasionally for seconds, and I suspect this is due to delays in NFS access. This is as likely to be a problem in Solaris as Linux, and may even be addressed in a Sun patch.
However, by using Linux instead of Solaris 2.6, I forsook NFS v3 support which immediately incurred a performance hit. V3 support for Linux is coming, maybe in 2.2. But it ain't there yet.
For a long time, xlock wouldn't even work for me. Then I bothered to track it down, and found out that I had somehow neglected to install it.
One minor thing still bugs me: why, oh why can't I get it to display its nifty animations on a black background, despite forcing every command line flag and X resource I can find?? Using a bright white background seems to negate the `screen-saving' idea.
It doesn't work with the options in the default AfterStep menu either. Probably easily cured - again, time!
All our office machines are tied into NIS. Linux has had client side NIS support for some time but again, it's still `maturing'. It works reasonably well initially, but you may need a later version if you want it to recover after a server outage. I also had several difficulties in making it bind at boot time:
After solving the initial headaches, NIS has worked fine ever since.
Solaris has a volume management daemon called vold which looks after mounting removeable media without requiring the user to have root access. It mounts CD-ROMs automatically and floppies after prompting with the volcheck command. On issuing the eject command, it automatically unmounts the volume before ejection. It can also execute arbitrary actions for particular media types, such as NFS export or starting Workman for audio CDs.
Linux seems to lack this facility by default, although I have a feeling that an equivalent tool exists (`supermount'?). I realise that the `user' mount option in fstab allows ordinary users to mount a device, but it still isn't quite as smart as letting something else automatically take care of it.