But, in retrospect, it might have been a very good move to use Linux and get familiar with it, and especially to contribute to its development, Linux might be

But, in retrospect, it might have been a very good move to use Linux and get familiar with it, and especially to contribute to its development, Linux might be all the rage now, but it won't last forever. I grew to intensely hate GNU/Linux precisely because I grew up on Solaris, and when I had to work on Linux extensively, it just made it painfully obvious how bad Linux is. Even to this present day, I work with Linux daily and it still isn't anywhere close to Solaris in terms of correctness of operation, reliability, or virtualization capability, let alone post mortem analysis. Even performance on Linux is a lie, as to get the same levels of performance as illumos does on the same hardware, Linux has to forego reliability guarantees. For example, check out how the GNU/Linux kernel handles the fsync(2) system call, and how it miscalculates system load because of wio (wait on input/output). And that is just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface. I was very happy and content with Solaris - it is a superb server OS, it is reliable, and it has served me extremely well, especially since I had virtually no incidents caused by the fault in the OS, but by misconfiguration by others. Under these circumstances, I had no incentive whatsoever to help with GNU/Linux, especially when Solaris became the free, open source illumos project. I certainly won't help Linux when I want SmartOS to succeed it (SmartOS is based on the illumos source code). But the biggest irony is that GNU/Linux can be made to run almost as reliably as Solaris / illumos - by running it inside of an lx-branded zone on SmartOS, because then the SmartOS hypervisor makes it more reliable because of ZFS and no memory overcommit, for instance. That's what one would call a proverbial slap in the face to GNU/Linux. (Even though one is running Linux, the kernel is actually illumos, that's why the thing is high performance and reliable.)