3 ms·

On the one hand, having basically one default Unix these days makes a lot of things easier for a lot of people; but at the same time, I don't like software mono

by jfb 6y ago

On the one hand, having basically one default Unix these days makes a lot of things easier for a lot of people; but at the same time, I don't like software monocultures. So, it's a mixed bag. But I'll tell you what: I do not miss HP/UX or AIX or Solaris or ...

asveikau 6y ago
I was thinking something very similar to this just reading the headline. We don't really have monoculture of Unix-like OSs in the strictest sense. It's true that a lot of people here will assume any server is Linux. But a lot of people reading are also using a Mac as a client OS. I myself use both FreeBSD and OpenBSD a lot [typing this on FreeBSD]. Just want to mention here that those are totally viable OSs. I believe many people, including here, do a disservice when they dismiss them.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> But I'll tell you what: I do not miss HP/UX or AIX or Solaris or ... I'm curious whether this includes Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris. It appears to me (as a latecomer) that Sun finally got their act together and shipped something technically superior to GNU+Linux, and that if they'd managed to stay in business that (Open)Solaris would be an extremely competitive offering. Or put differently, how much of this is that yes, the old unixen sucked, but just because they were old? I mean, if I compare Fedora 32 to Red Hat Linux 7 (RH, not RHEL), there's a world of difference there.
- derekp7 6y ago
  The big thing for me is that (Open) Solaris felt like a single solid product, the same feeling I always got from FreeBSD. Whereas the various Linux distributions always felt like a grab bag of various pieces, some of which worked well and others were still rough around the edges. Little things, like the days of LILO for a boot loader. It had to maintain a map of disk blocks that contained the kernel and initial ram disk, so if the kernel or initrd was re-written to /boot you had to re-run the lilo command to refresh its map (otherwise your system wouldn't boot). Took forever to get something that understood the filesystem. But what replaced it (Grub) I always felt was over-engineered. To me, the perfect successor to lilo would have been the tooling from isolinux (there were boot loaders that natively understood fat32, ext4, and other filesystems without having to have a mini OS built into the boot loader) -- just seemed to be more elegant to me. Then there were promising technologies that just up and disappeared (at least for a while) such as userfs. We now have fuse, but there were multiple years of distribution versions that didn't have either. Also, there were patches for older kernel versions that supported containers, but they were never mainstream until we got the current mix of process isolation features which enables things like Docker. Speaking of which, why is it that Solaris has an easy way to back out of an OS update (using Zones), but that same process (using Linux containers and snapshots) doesn't exist in any of the modern Linux distributions?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Yeah, I was trying to not be too aggressive about it, but OpenSolaris is literally my favorite OS of all time, and I'm a little annoyed that a decade later everything else has only managed to match it, and then poorly. ZFS is still better than any other filesystem, zones are still equal to LXC and only just eclipsed by Docker (and then, only in UX), eBPF may finally be better than DTrace, and pkg is just as good as dnf/zypper (and IMO better than apk/apt/pacman). > To me, the perfect successor to lilo would have been the tooling from isolinux Wouldn't that just be syslinux (/isolinux/extlinux)? On systems where I pick the bootloader, I usually use that since old grub is dead and grub2 is way more complex than I like. > Speaking of which, why is it that Solaris has an easy way to back out of an OS update (using Zones), but that same process (using Linux containers and snapshots) doesn't exist in any of the modern Linux distributions? Isn't that more of a ZFS+beadm thing than a zones thing? FWIW, openSUSE can do that using BTRFS. It... okay, again I honestly think ZFS+pkg did it better than BTRFS+zypper, but it does work quite well. You can also add it using things like snapper on Arch Linux if you're using a snapshotting filesystem.
- jfb 6y ago
  See, I was a SunOS user BITD and Solaris was terrible for as long as I needed to engage with it. I'm certain that it's quite good now.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Right; I don't doubt that Solaris 9 had its issues, but it was released in 2002; its contemporaries were things like Red Hat Linux 8 and Slackware 8.1 - it seems reasonable to expect that by modern standards, all of the old stuff sucked, albeit in different ways and degrees.
    - jfb 6y ago
      I last touched Solaris back when I had 39 1.44mb floppy disks of Slackware. I don't miss anything of that vintage, save for Mac OS 7.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Solaris was always technical superior to Linux, which copied quite a few features that appeared first on Solaris. Linux only managed to catch up thanks to Sun going bust (thanks in part to Google).

by jfb 6y ago

asveikau 6y ago

I was thinking something very similar to this just reading the headline. We don't really have monoculture of Unix-like OSs in the strictest sense. It's true that a lot of people here will assume any server is Linux. But a lot of people reading are also using a Mac as a client OS. I myself use both FreeBSD and OpenBSD a lot [typing this on FreeBSD]. Just want to mention here that those are totally viable OSs. I believe many people, including here, do a disservice when they dismiss them.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

> But I'll tell you what: I do not miss HP/UX or AIX or Solaris or ... I'm curious whether this includes Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris. It appears to me (as a latecomer) that Sun finally got their act together and shipped something technically superior to GNU+Linux, and that if they'd managed to stay in business that (Open)Solaris would be an extremely competitive offering. Or put differently, how much of this is that yes, the old unixen sucked, but just because they were old? I mean, if I compare Fedora 32 to Red Hat Linux 7 (RH, not RHEL), there's a world of difference there.

derekp7 6y ago
The big thing for me is that (Open) Solaris felt like a single solid product, the same feeling I always got from FreeBSD. Whereas the various Linux distributions always felt like a grab bag of various pieces, some of which worked well and others were still rough around the edges. Little things, like the days of LILO for a boot loader. It had to maintain a map of disk blocks that contained the kernel and initial ram disk, so if the kernel or initrd was re-written to /boot you had to re-run the lilo command to refresh its map (otherwise your system wouldn't boot). Took forever to get something that understood the filesystem. But what replaced it (Grub) I always felt was over-engineered. To me, the perfect successor to lilo would have been the tooling from isolinux (there were boot loaders that natively understood fat32, ext4, and other filesystems without having to have a mini OS built into the boot loader) -- just seemed to be more elegant to me. Then there were promising technologies that just up and disappeared (at least for a while) such as userfs. We now have fuse, but there were multiple years of distribution versions that didn't have either. Also, there were patches for older kernel versions that supported containers, but they were never mainstream until we got the current mix of process isolation features which enables things like Docker. Speaking of which, why is it that Solaris has an easy way to back out of an OS update (using Zones), but that same process (using Linux containers and snapshots) doesn't exist in any of the modern Linux distributions?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Yeah, I was trying to not be too aggressive about it, but OpenSolaris is literally my favorite OS of all time, and I'm a little annoyed that a decade later everything else has only managed to match it, and then poorly. ZFS is still better than any other filesystem, zones are still equal to LXC and only just eclipsed by Docker (and then, only in UX), eBPF may finally be better than DTrace, and pkg is just as good as dnf/zypper (and IMO better than apk/apt/pacman). > To me, the perfect successor to lilo would have been the tooling from isolinux Wouldn't that just be syslinux (/isolinux/extlinux)? On systems where I pick the bootloader, I usually use that since old grub is dead and grub2 is way more complex than I like. > Speaking of which, why is it that Solaris has an easy way to back out of an OS update (using Zones), but that same process (using Linux containers and snapshots) doesn't exist in any of the modern Linux distributions? Isn't that more of a ZFS+beadm thing than a zones thing? FWIW, openSUSE can do that using BTRFS. It... okay, again I honestly think ZFS+pkg did it better than BTRFS+zypper, but it does work quite well. You can also add it using things like snapper on Arch Linux if you're using a snapshotting filesystem.
jfb 6y ago
See, I was a SunOS user BITD and Solaris was terrible for as long as I needed to engage with it. I'm certain that it's quite good now.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Right; I don't doubt that Solaris 9 had its issues, but it was released in 2002; its contemporaries were things like Red Hat Linux 8 and Slackware 8.1 - it seems reasonable to expect that by modern standards, all of the old stuff sucked, albeit in different ways and degrees.
  - jfb 6y ago
    I last touched Solaris back when I had 39 1.44mb floppy disks of Slackware. I don't miss anything of that vintage, save for Mac OS 7.
pjmlp 6y ago
Solaris was always technical superior to Linux, which copied quite a few features that appeared first on Solaris. Linux only managed to catch up thanks to Sun going bust (thanks in part to Google).