4 ms·

RIP Solaris

28 points by wolfgke 9y ago

wahern 9y ago
Longer piece putting things in context: https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally-killed-sun/ https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally-killed-...
ainar-g 9y ago
As someone who only worked with "mainstream" Unix-flavoured OSes, what was the reason, if any, to ever use Solaris over say RHEL? Was there anything that Linux distributions couldn't provide, besides resources from Sun/Oracle?
- lemoncucumber 9y ago
  Solaris was technically superior to Linux in a lot of ways, and pioneered a lot of tech that only made its way to Linux later on and often in less elegant versions (if ever). For example ZFS, dtrace, zones, and mdb.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Hardware, vendor, consulting, and device support, principally. All four of these factors tended to fall off in significance pretty rapidly, and by 2005 or so, the choice to go with Solaris over Linux was not well-founded. For many organisations, that point came 5-7 years earlier. Linux was cheap and flexible. It required a fair bit of hand-holding, and you had to supply that yourself. It ran on commodity hardware, and in the world of the early Web, where that was precisely what you wanted for commodity webservers, and those were needed in quantity, Linux fit the bill. It expanded into other roles, in a near-perfect example of a Christensenian technological disruption. The Oracle load in particular was a fair argument to go with Solaris: yes, you could install Oracle on Red Hat (RHEL didn't exist until 2003), but it was a massive PITA.
privong 9y ago
This is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160149
ComputerGuru 9y ago
We - and a lot of other people in similar boats - moved from Solaris to FreeBSD a while back. That ship sailed a long time ago, there isn’t much that FreeBSD doesn’t do out of the box in a similar fashion to keep people from making the switch. The only thing I miss from Solaris is the focus on ABI compatibility. rlib was first-class, and apart from Windows, it’s the only OS I know that is fully abi compatible between the x86 and x86_64 kernels (actually even more than Windows. The entire system, drivers and all, will work with either the x86 or the AMD64 kernel booted up without recompiling).

28 points by wolfgke 9y ago

Longer piece putting things in context: https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally-killed-sun/ https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally-killed-...

ainar-g 9y ago

As someone who only worked with "mainstream" Unix-flavoured OSes, what was the reason, if any, to ever use Solaris over say RHEL? Was there anything that Linux distributions couldn't provide, besides resources from Sun/Oracle?

lemoncucumber 9y ago
Solaris was technically superior to Linux in a lot of ways, and pioneered a lot of tech that only made its way to Linux later on and often in less elegant versions (if ever). For example ZFS, dtrace, zones, and mdb.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Hardware, vendor, consulting, and device support, principally. All four of these factors tended to fall off in significance pretty rapidly, and by 2005 or so, the choice to go with Solaris over Linux was not well-founded. For many organisations, that point came 5-7 years earlier. Linux was cheap and flexible. It required a fair bit of hand-holding, and you had to supply that yourself. It ran on commodity hardware, and in the world of the early Web, where that was precisely what you wanted for commodity webservers, and those were needed in quantity, Linux fit the bill. It expanded into other roles, in a near-perfect example of a Christensenian technological disruption. The Oracle load in particular was a fair argument to go with Solaris: yes, you could install Oracle on Red Hat (RHEL didn't exist until 2003), but it was a massive PITA.

privong 9y ago

This is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160149

ComputerGuru 9y ago

We - and a lot of other people in similar boats - moved from Solaris to FreeBSD a while back. That ship sailed a long time ago, there isn’t much that FreeBSD doesn’t do out of the box in a similar fashion to keep people from making the switch. The only thing I miss from Solaris is the focus on ABI compatibility. rlib was first-class, and apart from Windows, it’s the only OS I know that is fully abi compatible between the x86 and x86_64 kernels (actually even more than Windows. The entire system, drivers and all, will work with either the x86 or the AMD64 kernel booted up without recompiling).