NOTE: This question is from 2014. As of 2019 the situation is different. OpenJDK is underlying all the various distributions, and should behave the same for all.
The standard cure for fixing Java problems with Linux distributions like Ubuntu is to say "Use the Sun JDK instead of OpenJDK". For several reasons I'd like to just use the Java shipping with Ubuntu instead of having to install and download from partner repositories or download tarballs.
I have played some with Eclipse 3.7.1 under Ubuntu 11.10 and not found any glaring showstoppers.
Question is: Is there anything not working correctly with the default installation of (EDIT: OpenJDK) Java on Ubuntu at all, or is there something I should look out for?
Now OpenJDK 7 is a standard implementation of Java. Oracle JDK 7 is built on openjdk7 code, except some additional features, which are not included in Java specification
So there should not be a performance difference(I can not see it). Ubuntu 11.10 has openjdk7 in the repository.
Otherwise Openjdk6 is really slower then SunJDK6. So if you need to use jdk6, it is better to switch to Sun JDK6
I've had quite a lot of problems with various plugins (Android Update) using the openjdk6 on Ubuntu 11.10. Sun JRE 'just fixed' the problems.
I can't just update to java 7 because I'm working with android open source (AOSP) which does not support compilation with java 7 yet. It only somewhat supports building with openjdk6.
Sometimes the bleeding edge is just bleeding. For now I'm staying with Sun JDK 6. Its the reference implementation and appears to 'just work'. Which is what I'm going for. These are tools for me, my primary purpose here is not to debug my tools before use.
Kudos for the OpenJDK folks for being 99.9% there. Once everyone else catches up with them life will be great.
Oh and Oracle can stuff-it for the license change that caused many of these problems. Larry does not need another boat.
-JZ
It's not that there's "anything not working correctly with the default installation of Java on Ubuntu". I've used OpenJDK a lot on Ubuntu and Fedora Core and never encountered bizzare errors.
However, and this is a big "however", if you use fancy frameworks like Hibernate or some of Spring's stuff (like AspectJ stuff), which do exotic, non-standard stuff (like bytecode modifications, recompilation on the fly etc etc), you WILL get into trouble with OpenJDK but they will all work ok with Oracle/Sun JDK. I always switch from OpenJDK to Oracle JDK when doing this kind of development.
