I'm sometimes shocked at how scornful proponents of the `free' Unices can be towards Sun and Solaris. Whilst the company has become more commercially-driven with the decision to go System V, its roots lie in hacker culture and it continues to employ leading figures such as Bill Joy and James Gosling. It has also subsidised or supported some open source development, such as sendmail and bind, in a bid to have updated versions of these ubiquitous programs integrated with Solaris (and of course, it's now a member of Linux International and is slowly responding to the calls to open up Solaris and Java). I admit I don't have much exposure to other commercial Unix versions, but that which I have suffered has shown much of the competition to lag far behind in updating their code (AIX anyone? SCO?). Indeed, I suspect some vendors are still shipping sendmail V5 in their OS. Sun have laudably released enhancements such as sendmail V8 and bind 4.9 as patches before rolling them into later releases. True, they've never been on the bleeding edge but then they have customers paying large sums for support contracts, which means they need to ship proven, stable code.
This is quite apart from the extensive work Sun has done in overhauling the SVR4 code base they purchased, the reboring of the kernel for full multi-threading being the major part. Right now, with the dedicated hardware to back it up, there's little to touch Solaris as an enterprise class Unix, which is why so many of the database vendors have forged close alliances with Sun.
Some common myths about Solaris:
Wrong. Solaris works quite well for most applications right out of the box (which is more than could be said for RHL 5.1 SPARC). Obviously, extensive patch lists have accumulated for all versions of Solaris and at some point you're probably going to want one or more of them, but you don't need them to use it straight away. Even the majority of patches on the recommended list are unlikely to be required by the average site. Many Sun sites have never bothered to keep up with patches; before the Internet become widespread, this was especially common. (I can remember when SunService shipped you the notorious lockd patch for SunOS4 on QIC tape, with an envelope so that you could return the tape after installation.)
Sometimes true, more so with anything pre-2.4. Often true on legacy spec desktop machines. Unfair on the high end enterprise hardware.
Right. The situation continues to improve with updated releases of AdminSuite, but then it could hardly do otherwise. I've yet to see anything impressive come out under the Solstice banner. (However, even the old admintool will rescue you from entering loads of the most obscure LP print system commands to configure printing from scratch.)
Well I like it (not referring to CDE, of course). ;-)
Against this, how does S/Linux measure up?
It may be a little unfair to compare Linux with MacOS. That's rather like comparing a 4x4 with a hatchback; they do different jobs and appeal to different markets. However, I believe the comparison is worthwhile for the following reasons:
I'm sorry, but MacOS beats Linux hands down for ease of use. Zealots will cry that it isn't configurable enough, hasn't kept up with UI developments, encourages a point-and-drool approach rather than actual thought and lacks a shell. This misses the point: in terms of providing the ability to use a computer to achieve something not directly related to computing (rumour has it that real users want to do this), nothing beats MacOS for staying out of your way.
I've heard many hackers point to the one button mouse on the Mac as one of the worst UI design decisions of the computing era. I disagree; whilst I can see why someone would want more buttons, the fact that only one is required is a tribute to the ease with which MacOS can be driven. Other graphical interfaces should be so lucky (look at Win95, which can't even use two buttons consistently).
Of course, I wouldn't want to write LATEX on my Mac, or develop software on it. There's less to play with under the hood. And occasionally, one becomes tired with the endless clicking and dragging. But sometimes, this is all you require.