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It seems your complaint is that it's not Linux or some other OSS project. As far as what I want from a server, Solaris is competitive with everything. When some
by wang_li 12y ago
It seems your complaint is that it's not Linux or some other OSS project. As far as what I want from a server, Solaris is competitive with everything. When something goes wrong it's very clear about what has happened. Out of the box and with no fiddling required, it supports all the reliability features of the hardware. The ZFS filesystem is state of the art and they've utilized it's features quite ingeniously to provide some of the cleverest OS patching and boot drive administration anywhere. And, in my experience, Oracle support is vastly better than Red Hat support. The pkg system is well thought out.
Sure, it's "different" and not "cool", but it is a good product and has some really solid engineering and design behind it. People just need to understand that it's not a desktop OS.
- SwellJoe 12y agoI perhaps should have wrapped that in some kind of disclaimer about the markets in which I think Solaris doesn't matter anymore. Though I stand by the argument that Oracle doesn't care about Solaris enough to keep it alive as a viable competitor to Linux. The specific market I care about is web application service and development. And, in that market Solaris is so close to dead that it doesn't even matter if it's still breathing (unless you develop with Java against an Oracle database). This is relevant because Sun and Solaris backed by Oracle databases owned the first generation of the web. They've lost it, and are exhibiting no effort to regain it, or even hold the last remaining bits of the market they still have. And, I think it's relevant that so few people know Solaris. I'm reasonably comfortable with it, as I cut my teeth in the sysadmin world when Sun systems still showed up now and then. But, it's been more than a decade since I've seen a Sun in the wild. Lack of new developers and new IT folks working with Solaris systems virtually guarantees it will continue to become less popular. Nobody starting a new web or mobile app thinks, "I know, I'll buy a bunch of Sun servers!" So, I think you're arguing that Solaris is "good", while I'm arguing that it is irrelevant. We can both be right. Except about this: "The pkg system is well thought out." That's hilarious.
- wang_li 12y agoI know this is a long dead conversation, but pkg in Solaris 11 is quite nice. It's not your grandfather's SysV packaging any more.