Re: Solaris: The Most Advanced OS?
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.
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Paul D. Smith <psmith@nortel.com> HASMAT--HA Software Mthds & Tools
"Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
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These are my opinions--Nortel takes no responsibility for them.
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