Solaris 11 has the security solution Linus wants for Desktop Linux

I'm going to go on a small tangent here and ask: Solaris ... <i>desktop</i>??<p>I've been using Linux on the desktop for quite some time now, and couldn't be happier. However I come to realize, after trying to "convert" a lot of people around me, Unix isn't made for the "desktop" (understand, unfortunately, Windows-clone).<p>I also use Solaris (10, not 11m but still) at work. All the time. And if Linux isn't that great on the desktop, Solaris is a catastrophe.<p>I'm not being very convincing, as the points I'm mentionning would take a whole blog post to prove. My question here is the following:<p>If this article is on the Oracle website, could it mean that the people at Redwood are trying to be more agressive on the desktop market? Or are they simply using Linus' name to attract traffic?

Debian/Ubuntu doesn't create a root login (by default) at all, so there is no root password.<p>Linux already has RBAC - if you look in /etc/group, you will see a group "lpadmin", if you are in the group, you can add/configure/delete printers (after authenticating with your user password). To the best of my knowledge, this is what Oracle is bragging about, and is equivalent to Microsoft's UAC (with Win7, they finally made it as convenient as linux).

RBAC is nice in itself, but you can't really use Solaris on average desktop. No drivers, costs money to use in production... and still no sol11 ON sources they promised?

Along with many Linux distributions, because they ship PolicyKit policies allowing some of these things by default. That said, Solaris is used on servers and should probably default to a reduced attack surface over convenience.

I ran OpenSolaris on the desktop for a little while. That experiment lasted only about two weeks before I gave up due to various things just not working correctly.<p>I wonder if things are any different with Solaris 11, or more likely I'd be running OpenIndiana which so far has worked really well for the server work I have it doing.

So serious question, how does this significantly differ from the user account controls in Windows? Even before the Vista/7 UAC was introduced, you could set permissions for a user to be able to do certain things and not other certain things. UAC increased this ability with the slider.<p>Obviously it sounds like Unix had more fine-grained controls earlier than Windows did, but it still seems like Microsoft could write this same article on behalf of Linus.

RBAC is garbage... developers and such need to write complicated rulesets for n solutions of RBAC systems. A less painful solution would be what FreeBSD currently has - capsicum.

I somehow find it hard to believe Linus doesn't know about "sudo"...