On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 11:27:11AM -0500, Brian Wood wrote:
> Is anyone using OpenSolaris?  I know Oracle closed Solaris
> development, but there are derivatives of OpenSolaris.  I'm using
> Arch Linux, but am thinking about the following comments from
> a C++ newsgroup.  I'm thinking that eventually I may use Solaris
> from Oracle so using OpenSolaris before that might be a good idea.
> Tia.
> 
> >>>> One thing about Unix, especially modern Linux distros, is that it has
> >>>> been kind of designed for development, unlike Windows, which has been
> >>>> designed as a graphical user interface, with little regard to anything
> >>>> else.
> >>>
> >>> That comment shouldn't be specific to Linux, most modern UNIX systems
> >>> are equally, if not more, developer friendly.
> >>
> >> Apart from the *BSDs, not in the sense that JN meant.  Are there
> >> really any left, anyway?
> >
> > In my opinion Solaris (and the numerous OpenSolaris derivatives) have
> > better developer tools than Linux, especially for analysing applications
> > (and the OS) in a production0n environment.

Dtrace is a better system performance evaluation tool, and that's
about the only thing that *Solaris has 'better' than Linux at this
point.  The Sun^WOracle Studio C/C++ compilers runs just fine under
Linux as well, if you need second set of diagnostics (it usually helps
to keep code clean and portable).

I used to run it in a KVM virtual machine, just for testing purposes.
I tried to run it on bare metal, but the lack of hardware support
reminds me of Linux circa '97.  Case in point, I have motherboard
(EVGA with dual onboard Gigabit 3COM/Marvell controllers) that Linux
runs smoothly on.  Solaris works as well, and even has driver for the
family of NICs that include my particular model, but my NICs PCI ids
are blacklisted due to some bug that was sitting in a bugzilla for two
years.  It did not reach critical mass with enthusiasts so it does
have a bleak future for hobbyists.

OpenSolaris is slowly becoming like MacOS - it only runs on certain
hardware configurations.  The 'uber' UNIX hackers at Sun wanted to
keep all the goodness for themselves... now, they can have it, since
nobody else can run it, should they want to.  The *BSDs have much
better hardware support.

Cheers,
florin

-- 
Sent from my other microwave oven.
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