3 ms·

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 distributio

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.

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.