[Tfug] Solaris x86 experience

[Quag7]

On Tue, 2003-12-23 at 00:25, Neil Short wrote:

> Yes, I know that Solaris is not really a good "hobby"
> OS; but I'm thinking this may be a little bit over the
> line. Maybe it's just me.

I couldn't find anything interesting about it from the perspective of a
home/hobby OS.  I'll take everyone's (well, everyone who says so) word
for it that its a fine enterprise OS from a stability and/or support
standpoint but it's really no fun at all for any of my personal needs. 
I just wanted to try it out since a lot of servers where I work run it. 
I haven't had the problems you mention with manpages.  I used a standard
PS/2 mouse, which worked okay, so I can't say what experience I'd have
with USB devices.

All of that being said I'm sure I could adapt to it without too much
problem if I needed to.  Just have to learn the tools and the like.  But
if you're underwhelmed, you're not alone.  I'm not sure what I was
expecting anyway.  Still, it runs a lot of apps at work, and runs them
very reliably, and I presume this is the main selling point.  How
Solaris compares on a day to day basis with xBSD or Linux I don't know. 
I admin a Linux webserver that has had no downtime in a year other than
that which I planned for maintenance and kernel upgrades.  It's not
serving anything other than HTML, PHP, and running sendmail however.

I did have fun with FreeBSD and Debian Linux - both things I don't
typically run regularly (I'm a Gentoo fan by habit and familiarity now -
I have noticed that peoples' favorite distributions tend to be what they
are most familiar with which makes finding objective comparative
opinions hard to come by; I'm no different, but I try to keep an open
mind) - to the extent where I made a mental note to play with them more
and run them more seriously.  I didn't feel the same about Solaris.  But
again, this is at home in my office.  I've come across opinions (online)
of people who swear by it.  Of course, they're generally not talking
about Solaris for Intel, either.

Linux and FreeBSD definitely seem to be more *fun*.  Once I got used to
another distro, or a BSD, I'm sure I'd be happy with it.  Not sure about
Solaris yet.


quag7 at frostwarning.com * Tucson, AZ - USA
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