# Oracle Solaris 65 Hacker News commenters recommended Oracle Solaris and 43 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 5 years (4 owners). **Verdict:** People recommend Solaris for its integrated ZFS, Zones and DTrace tooling, long uptimes and solid kernel. Critics say Sun-era lock-in and paid support kept it from keeping pace with Linux. ## Why people recommend it - Integrated ZFS, Zones and DTrace tooling (4 comments): "zones, dtrace, smf, iscsi and zfs were very well integrated together and lightyears beyond what was available in the Linux space at the time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49792877)) "It’s great for ZFS and for Zones, including Linux zones." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47325465)) "If you want ZFS use Solaris not an ersatz system that imported OpenZFS code." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708952)) - Very long uptime and stability (4 comments): "my longest uptime production system was a sparc postgres system under sustained high load with uptime of around 6 years" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162772)) "Solaris and BSD would have months of uptime on similar hardware" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47844242)) "Solaris test machines that had been up for 2+ years" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736784)) - Fondly remembered as favourite UNIX (4 comments): "I was more found of Solaris, Irix, NeXTSTEP in how they approached the whole development experience." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46044671)) "I loved those solaris machines in our department lab!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200919)) "Irix, Solaris and NeXTSTEP are my favourite UNIXes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46504746)) - Strong documentation and compatibility (3 comments): "The POSIX API worked out of the box on FreeBSD and Solaris exactly as documented." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106219)) "Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX also maintain excellent backwards binary compatibility" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47996770)) "no operating system has ever matched the quality of its man pages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48003436)) ## What people warn about - Vendor lock-in and enterprise paywalls (4 comments): "Cancelling -if briefly- Solaris on x86 in 2002. This killed Solaris in the minds of many who didn't want to be locked into Sun for SPARC." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49793037)) "This killed Solaris in the minds of many who didn't want to be locked into Sun for SPARC." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49859989)) "They're stuck with an abusive, litigious, opaque vendor and will migrate out when they can." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326127)) - Overtaken by Linux and GNU tools (3 comments): "By the mid 1990s it was clear that the (platform-independent) GNU command line tools were generally superior to what was on Solaris" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49788760)) "Solaris 10 was too little too late" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46709810)) "The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790079)) - Concurrency and locking bugs (2 comments): "these were solid workhorses. But, i did end up finding concurrency bugs when they introduced their multi-core integer computing behemoth." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790342)) "Entire universities lost a day's work when their editors were all fatally stuck in an rpc.lockd bug." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49788950)) - Slow performance and resource handling (2 comments): "ran about an order of magnitude (~25s vs 3s) slower on Solaris/SparcV9 vs Linux/Intel P3 circa 2003" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790399)) "it was called "Slow arse". This was because it was rather reluctant in handing out resources" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49789512)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Windows](https://hackerapproved.com/p/windows.md): 1287 recommend - [macOS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/macos.md): 1041 recommend - [Linux](https://hackerapproved.com/p/linux.md): 745 recommend - [Haiku](https://hackerapproved.com/p/haiku-os.md): 115 recommend - [NetBSD](https://hackerapproved.com/p/netbsd.md): 100 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.oracle.com/solaris/solaris11/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Oracle Solaris", https://hackerapproved.com/p/solaris/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).