Solaris: The Most Advanced OS?

[Tshepang Lekhonkhobe]

On 07 Nov 2005 08:47:12 -0500, Paul Smith <psmith at nortel.com> wrote:
> For desktops, and even smaller servers, I really prefer Linux.  Sure,
> 99% of the tools on Linux can also be compiled for Solaris.  But it's
> WORK to do that!  Trust me, I maintained a repository of GNU and other
> F/OSS tools for our company for years: it's a big pain in the rear to
> manage it all yourself: software dependencies, upgrade issues, etc. etc.
>
> And all this even AFTER I simply told people that I'd be updating
> software in that repository as I felt like it, without official
> announcements, querying everyone as to good/bad times, etc.  Also, I
> only kept older versions around if the package was designed to make that
> easy to do.  Even so it was a huge time-sink.  And yes, I do know about
> things like sunfreeware.com which are better, but still a far cry from
> what you get on Linux.
>
> This is not to mention hardware support, where Linux is much better than
> Solaris.
>
>
> However, Solaris still has Linux beat in a few critical enterprise
> areas: for example, Linux's NFS and automount support still needs work
> to match Solaris.  Sure, Linux supports NFSv4 and Solaris doesn't (I
> don't think), but we don't have any NFSv4 yet.  What we do have are lots
> of problems with our Linux desktops because of things like the
> automounter mounts every partition exported by a server whenever you
> access any partition via /net/host, not just one partition.  Also, no
> partitions will be unmounted until every partition on the server is
> ready to be unmounted.  Combined with the fact that Linux gets pretty
> unstable/unhappy with >1280 or so NFS mounts and you've got problems in
> large enterprise spaces: we have big EMC NFS fileservers that export
> LOTS of partitions and we run into this all the time at some of our
> sites.  Also, we've had issues with NIS and NSCD getting confused with
> long entries (using the trick of breaking up long lists into multiple
> entries with the same GID for groups for example).  There are also some
> annoying "holes" in Linux: for example we use ClearCase for source code
> control, and that system does a funky kind of loopback filesystem
> mount.  However, the Linux /proc is not completely implemented for
> loopback mounts, so some kinds of accesses to /proc fail inside one of
> these mounts (Expect spawn() fails, for example, as does df, and a few
> other things).
>
>
> I use Linux all day every day, and Solaris less and less... but if Linux
> could just focus on a few "enterprise-level" areas like the above (NFS,
> automount, NIS for _big_ environments) and clean up some things it would
> be sooooo much better.

Wow!!! So Solaris kernel is generally technically superior... and what a post.