I have been reading around about Solaris for some time now, after hearing about ZFS. I have done a good deal of research on it, though very little is really available, and even less about the features and use and practicality of Solaris as a desktop and multimedia OS.

I have a good deal of experience with Linux in many many flavors and have been running Gentoo for a few months. I would like to branch out a bit now to Solaris to give it a go, but have some questions about whether it is time for me to try it or not.

It appears based on some of my reading around that Solaris 10 isn't actually released yet even though Solaris 10 1/06 and Solaris Express 6/06 are out. Is Solaris 10 really unreleased at this point, and how stable are the Express releases? Is it something I can use as my main OS on my second system? On a similar vein, OpenSolaris seems to have plenty of various releases as well, and I would like to try Solaris of some flavor. What benefits drawbacks do I have with OpenSolaris compared to Express or base Solaris 10?

ZFS seems pretty impressive, has anyone been using for awhile that can comment to its stability and performance as a desktop(read NOT SERVER) FS?

I see that some versions of the Express and OpenSolaris come with X, this would be appreciated by me, I would like to try Solaris as is, but I would also like to be able to use modular XOrg(6.9 or 7.0) with it. Is this possible? And as a continuation, how about running other things like XGL, KDE, or Gnome?

Thanks for answering some new to Solaris questions.

Beta of Solaris 10 have been made available since september 2004.
Solaris 10 has been released in january 2005.
Solaris 10 update 1 has been released in january 2006.
Solaris 10 update 2 will be in the next days.

Solaris Express is a generic name applying to the next release of Solaris. It used to be Solaris 10, but since winter 2004, it applies to "Solaris 11, a.k.a. Nevada".

No.
Rock solid.
Sure, although the licence requires you to update after 6 month.
OpenSolaris is not a full O/S distribution, it is the source code kernel and utilities distribution.
Sun's OpenSolaris distribution is Solaris Express, there are other, independant distros:
- SchilliX, from Jeorg Schilling (mkisofs and cdrecord author)
- Belenix, an Indian live-cd
- Nexenta, a.k.a. GnuSolaris (Ubuntu Dapper Drake on top of Open Solaris kernel)
- Polaris, first distribution for PPC
- marTux, first distribution for sparc
- Portaris, unofficial/unreleased yet Gentoo's Portage project.
Solaris Express is more cutting edge, has more features, but has not the same level of support Solaris 10 (or 9 or 8) have.
I've been using it on my laptop since it's available in november 2005 (Solaris Express build27a), and very happy with it.
All of them are doing it, hopefully.
The modular Xorg 6.9 is the standard X11 server for Solaris running on x86 H/W.
No XGL I'm aware of, although 3D GL acceleration is supported on nVidia H/W.
You can easily install KDE from various sources. Some distros have it preinstalled.
Gnome is the default graphic environment (JDS).

I appreciate your help. It did seem odd that Solaris 10 wasn't actually out when I had read other things claiming it had been since like Nov 2004, I will get Express I think, cause I would like latest and greatest.

Thanks for all the info, I appreciate it as a Solaris newb.