> Hi, I write here because a professor left me an
> investigation about solaris, and I would like some
> opinions from people who uses solaris.
I'd like to share my personal view on Solaris. Five years ago it was may be not
dying, but in very difficult situation: there were a lot of good engineers
working on it, but there were no new blood sufficient for it to survive. Last
five years Sun made everything to resurrect it: OS was free for production use,
large part of Solaris became open, OpenSolaris binary distribution was
aggressively promoted and popularized. It received key Solaris technologies
and even official Sun support. Even now it a perfect system for high-load
servers (Solaris scalability is well known). ZFS, Zones and DTrace technologies
make this system easy to administrate. But there are some problems with user
soft for (Open)Solaris (gnome has been historically overpatched, a lot of
opensource projects are not tested on Solaris very well, there is insufficient
of binary packages comparing to FreeBSD ports collection or Ubuntu
repository).
Solaris systems have tendency to be binary compatible, on other hand this
sometimes leads to outdated soft.
Absence of free updates make this system inappropriate for home use (however,
it can be used like corporate desktop or home OS for some geeks). In our
university we moved almost everything from Solaris/AIX to FreeBSD/Windows (and
now investigating some variants of Linux usage, e.g. for Oracle application
server).
After Oracle acquisition I would not stake on (Open)Solaris. I wish the things
were better for Solaris, but it seems that for new installations (especially in
campus, where resources are limited) it doesn't fit... In my opinion, FreeBSD (
or CentOS/Debian from Linux land ) looks more safe now for servers and Ubuntu -
for desktop...
Concerning unique Solaris features...
SystemTap on Linux is comparable with DTrace now. FreeBSD support for DTrace is
far from perfect.
ZFS is supported on FreeBSD. Linux has Btrfs (however, not ready yet for
production).
Zones are comparable with FreeBSD jails (or Vimage) and Linux Vserver.
The only key thing (in my opinion) where Solaris bets both is scalability,
however, this needs investigation in every custom case.
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