Oracle Solaris

Long-term owners

my longest uptime production system was a sparc postgres system under sustained high load with uptime of around 6 years

Dec 2025 · comment

Solaris test machines that had been up for 2+ years

Jun 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• WindowsRecommended for running the software and games people depend on, day-to-day stability and solid underlying engineering, but critics widely object to Windows 11's ads, telemetry, forced accounts and UI regressions.1287recommend
• macOSRecommended for consistent keyboard shortcuts, strong security, tight Apple ecosystem integration and getting work done without fiddling, though critics cite recent bugs, CPU spikes, clunky window management and UI regressions.1041recommend
• LinuxA free, open-source OS praised for total control, stability and wide hardware and software support, especially on servers; desktop use can still take extra effort and debugging.745recommend
• HaikuA free BeOS-inspired desktop OS praised for being extremely fast and responsive with a clean, consistent UI, though many say it's not yet practical as a daily driver.115recommend
• NetBSDRecommended for running on almost any hardware, including old machines, with a clean, well-documented design, though support for modern hardware and drivers is weak.100recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 127 comments. Each links to the original.

1. zones, dtrace, smf, iscsi and zfs were very well integrated together and lightyears beyond what was available in the Linux space at the time.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “What Sun got wrong”

2. these were solid workhorses. But, i did end up finding concurrency bugs when they introduced their multi-core integer computing behemoth.

   Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “What Sun got wrong”

3. 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.

   Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “What Sun got wrong”

4. my longest uptime production system was a sparc postgres system under sustained high load with uptime of around 6 years

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Ephemeral infrastructure: Why short-lived is a good thing”

5. I was more found of Solaris, Irix, NeXTSTEP in how they approached the whole development experience.

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Why I (Still) Love Linux ?”

6. The POSIX API worked out of the box on FreeBSD and Solaris exactly as documented.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “A Love Letter to FreeBSD”

7. Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX also maintain excellent backwards binary compatibility

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “Windows API Is Successful Cross-Platform API”

8. If you want ZFS use Solaris not an ersatz system that imported OpenZFS code.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “FreeBSD Laptop Compatibility: Top Laptops to Use with FreeBSD”

9. no operating system has ever matched the quality of its man pages

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “A Desktop Made for One”

10. Solaris and BSD would have months of uptime on similar hardware

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman”

11. it was more stable and polished than Linux was at the time

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “illumos”

12. It’s great for ZFS and for Zones, including Linux zones.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “A New Version of Our Oracle Solaris Environment for Developers”

13. file server capabilities (native ZFS & Ko) of Solaris

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company”

14. I loved those solaris machines in our department lab!

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “I've built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of”

15. Irix, Solaris and NeXTSTEP are my favourite UNIXes.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The last supported version of HP-UX is no more”

16. Solaris test machines that had been up for 2+ years

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Have You Restarted Your Computer This Week?”

17. Solaris was my favourite UNIX during those days.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “illumos”

18. 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.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “What Sun got wrong”

19. By the mid 1990s it was clear that the (platform-independent) GNU command line tools were generally superior to what was on Solaris

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “What Sun got wrong”

20. Entire universities lost a day's work when their editors were all fatally stuck in an rpc.lockd bug.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “What Sun got wrong”

21. ran about an order of magnitude (~25s vs 3s) slower on Solaris/SparcV9 vs Linux/Intel P3 circa 2003

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “What Sun got wrong”

22. it was called "Slow arse". This was because it was rather reluctant in handing out resources

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “What Sun got wrong”

23. They're stuck with an abusive, litigious, opaque vendor and will migrate out when they can.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “A New Version of Our Oracle Solaris Environment for Developers”

24. This killed Solaris in the minds of many who didn't want to be locked into Sun for SPARC.

    Criticizes · Sep 2026

25. the problem was Solaris 9 just being massively overtaken by desktop Linux in every way

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “illumos”

26. everything was locked up behind enterprise paywalls and traditional sales processes

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “illumos”

27. Solaris 10 was too little too late

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “illumos”

28. Solaris and FreeBSD had significantly better implementations of the containerisation/isolation piece from a technical standpoint.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Ruby and Its Neighbors: Smalltalk”

29. You're never going to get something like Tarkovsky's Solaris again that just shows you a highway scene for five minutes.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix”

30. What would an alien intelligence truly look like, especially in planet size scales, really interesting theories

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Book Review: There Is No Antimemetics Division”

31. Those platforms had their problems, but they proved you could do a lot better than Windows for reliability.

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible”

32. Solaris could deal with an unrecoverable ECC error by killing the process that had the bad memory.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “What Sun got wrong”

33. they had various systems running on Solaris, AIX, etc, all with "normal" naming conventions

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “The last supported version of HP-UX is no more”

34. Solaris was impressive in its day, it could have had a stronger holding even today.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux”

35. my workstation was an AMD with Solaris on it, with a modern window manager and all

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “What Sun got wrong”

36. the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging in active use since 2015

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “A New Version of Our Oracle Solaris Environment for Developers”

37. 2.5.1 was the first release I felt comfortable running instead of SunOS 4.x.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “What Sun got wrong”

38. Solaris and HP/UX had some vendor-only things that were hard to replicate.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers”

39. one of the most innovative and coolest AI model demos I've seen this year

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Solaris, Our Interface World Models”

40. You can't compile and run a modern version of GCC on Solaris 10 on SPARC

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Apple is dropping AFP/TimeCapsule support in macOS 27”