I stated a few vague reasons for switching to Linux earlier. Were they justified?
Going from one version of Unix to another, particularly when both have a lot in common with the SVR4 strand, is not such an upheaval. The richness of the Linux environment makes for a marginally more pleasant computing experience. The desktop interface certainly took some getting used to and, as I mentioned above, I haven't entirely got to grips with it.
Beyond that, it wasn't such a major change. If I had previously been a Windows user (especially a reluctant, technically competent one), I'm sure the story would have been much different, considerably to the advantage of Linux.
Obviously Linux is garnering a lot of press coverage and column inches at present, partly because it is a good OS whose time has come and partly because it presents competition to Microsoft from a wholly unexpected quarter. It makes for a good story (but beware that backlash)!
Ignoring the hype, it's fun to be part of a movement and to see whether the product lives up to its reputation from the inside. The truth is that Linux for SPARC probably isn't quite as exciting as the more widespread and popular Intel original. There's less support; you'll search harder to find S/Linux binaries and RPMs, for example. In cases where a particular application isn't open source, this can be a big drawback. (For example, without Netscape's limited efforts, there wouldn't be a decent, standard, easily attainable web browser for S/Linux.)
This would probably be the leading motivation for switching to Linux. Comparisons with Solaris performance are subjective as I never ran the two side by side or did any quantitative benchmarking (I believe available figures show that S/Linux is faster). The machine didn't feel faster to any remarkable degree. However, given the increased complexity and featureset of the desktop it was running compared to OLVWM (for example, AfterStep does real time window updates while dragging), one would have to say it did more with the same resources.
Overall, the desktop felt marginally smoother and more responsive despite S/Linux's inherent weaknesses compared to Solaris (the chief factor probably being lack of NFS v3). On a level playing field (identical software and capabilities), I would expect S/Linux to come out noticeably ahead. At one point, I was forced to switch to an SS5 with only 32Mb of memory. S/Linux copes better with this restriction than Solaris 2.6. (In part, this may be because under Linux, you can run smaller programs - for example, substituting rxvt for xterm).
Better? Having instant access to all the GNU utilities is convenient, alongside other toys like NcFTP, Mutt & Tin (these would probably be more useful if Red Hat supplied the latest releases). Indeed, I didn't even know of the updated GV PostScript viewer until I encountered it under Linux; I have since compiled it for Solaris too.
On the other hand, it's a pain downloading so many megs to obtain basic functionality like sound and web browsing (witness the amount of updated RPMs I pulled from RawHide). I expect this will ease off as Red Hat upgrade their official releases. Linux users are used to downloading updated versions of software - the rapid churn of development is obviously part of its appeal - but those who wish to have a fully-featured environment immediately will not appreciate hunting for extra components or even essential updates elsewhere.
In some cases, those extra components don't even exist or have only unsatisfactory alternatives. Try finding a S/Linux binary for Adobe Acrobat, for example. Or a Sun-approved Java implementation (bye bye, Scheduler - OK, it ran like a dog on my SS5 anyway).
Yes, I definitely learnt a lot more about Linux, as one would expect. Quite a lot about configuration and a sharp appreciation of the myriad tiny differences that can occur from installation to installation. From a product support point of view, this is not going to make my job any easier. We're hoping to reduce the problems by only officially supporting one distribution initially (in this case RHL 5.1 since that's what we use in the office).
This is only on the software side. Thankfully, there is little worry about SPARC hardware support. However, our HA product is only being sold for the Intel platform and, as we all know, there are a million possible combinations here. We're already getting email asking which disks and SCSI adaptors will work (to which the basic answer is, ``Suck 'em and see'').