A Sun engineer on Linux [LWN.net]

A Sun engineer on Linux

Posted Sep 23, 2004 17:10 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: A Sun engineer on Linux by philips
Parent article: A Sun engineer on Linux

I don't understand your post... "Everybody loves it [Solaris]." vs. "Solaris makes [good hardware] crappy."

It's true that hardware selection takes more effort when buying a Linux box than a Sun box, especially for server grade hardware. So, buy your box from a reputable Linux vendor and get a service contract. Don't just throw Linux onto random hardware you have lying around and then expect it to be a well-tested, 100% reliable solution. (I'm not saying you did this -- I don't know -- but a lot of people do).

I last worked on Solaris in 2000. I remember banging my head into a bunch of SysV vs. BSDisms, and that the desktop environments (either OL or CDE) were truly poor. There also wasn't much of a support community for small problems.

So, though it got the job done, I sure didn't love Solaris.

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A Sun engineer on Linux

Posted Sep 23, 2004 23:49 UTC (Thu) by cajal (guest, #4167) [Link]

Well, a lot has changed on Solaris since 2000.

Most of the shell utilities now accept the "-h" argument. There's Blastwave for automated
package installation and upgrades. There's Solaris Patch Manager for automated OS patching.
Sun now ships GNOME by default with Solaris (and you can get KDE from Blastwave if you want
it). And I have to say, the current Solaris Express builds are *a lot* snappier than Solaris 8 on the
same hardware.

I tried Solaris (briefly) back in the 2.7 and 2.8 days, and then went with Linux. But I'm seriously
looking at Solaris 10 - a lot has changed, and I like a lot of what I've seen.