2 ms·

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

• 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.