Back to the topic of operating system release names.
Earlier this month I wrote about how the Ubuntu release names can get rather confusing. An interesting reply of sorts was made to that posting.
The author brings up the point that other operating systems besides Ubuntu use release names, either instead of or in addition to release numbers. Systems like Mac OS X, and recent releases of Windows are given as examples. Yes, the same problems with the Ubuntu release names do apply equally well to Mac OS X and recent releases of Windows. It perhaps isn’t as much of a problem with those systems yet, as the duration between releases has been relatively long. Thus there are a smaller number of names to remember, and each name is used for a loner amount of time. But with a new Ubuntu release every six months, the names begin to add up.
As for Sun’s use of the name “Nevada” for Solaris 11, I think it’s pretty irrelevant. Every colleague I work with refers to it as Solaris 11. It just causes less confusion that way. Then again, Sun hasn’t been the best when it comes to the Solaris version numbers, either. Some long-time Solaris users I work with refer to Solaris 10 as Solaris 2.10. One guy I know calls it SunOS 5.10! But he’s been using Sun systems since the 1980s, so I suppose he can be forgiven.
One thing the Ubuntu team should have done was to choose their release names alphabetically. At least then we’d have a clear ordering between releases, even if such a system didn’t offer the clarity of year/month-based version numbers.