Solaris

belgariontheking

I hate Solaris. It is a constant pain in my rear end and reminds me that free products can indeed be better than paid-for products.

My question: Do you use Solaris? If so, is there any reason in the world that you would choose it over any other operating system ever? note the open-endedness of the question -- I think DOS 1.0 is better than Solaris. Hell, I never used CP/M but I bet it's better too. AS/400? worlds better!

My current complaints:

limit of 16 groups that a user can be in and a limit of 16 users per group.
completely b0rked ViM installation. I have to hit backspace to do what delete does, and have to get out of insert mode to do what backspace does by hitting d <left>. Don't even get me started on the syntax highlighting b0rkiness.
defaults to ksh
man pages fucked up. I can scroll down with CTRL-D but that's the only thing I can do. can't scroll up, can't go down or up one line, nothing.
ps doesn't do what its man page claims it can do.
NOTE that some of these are Solaris' fault, and some are the fault of the incompetent admins of the system.

Welbog

My university's Unix environment was all Solaris. Solaris was my first Unix and it was very well administered so I don't really have any complaints about it. Sucks to be you.

amischiefr

We are using Solaris here for our web servers for some reason, and I agree that they kind of suck. Partially, as you said, because of stupid admins, but also partially because of the support. If you look at the man page for some commands it shows all of the available switches that you could use. However, when you try to use some of them, even thought it showed up in the man page, the system tells you that it is an unavailable flag.

Now, to be fair to Solaris I don't know enough about system admin to tell whether it is a fault of the admins, the install or the OS.

I like solaris. However, one problem I have with it is that you can't write IO to a raw device without formatting it first. No other operating system requires that.

Daid

Funny I have most of those problems with a Suse machine. Most of it has to do with terminal settings, but I cannot seem to get it right. Telnet and SSH give different results, as does a vnc session with xterm.

arty

Saying that dos 1.0 is more usable than solaris is a bit harsh isn't it? solaris 2.4 was nothing short of brilliant back in the day. It's not really that solaris declined, IMO, but it also didn't advance. Solaris releases in the 90s puttered around with so many failed experiments, but in the end they didn't really yield lasting improvements... So sad. *sigh*

I always chalked it up to bloody stubbornness that they never fixed the broken imake configs or terminfo that ship with solaris.

I really hope that ibm takes sun over and makes something great out of it again, rather than watching it fritter and wither away like sgi.