As you may already have noticed we have released new ISO and USB images for OpenIndiana Hipster some days ago. As usual we have received many updates via illumos-gate, eg. the latest Intel and AMD CPU microcode updates, the latest time zone changes and lots of enhancements for BHyVe and the internal SMB server.
Does anybody still legitimately use any of the variants of Solaris? It certainly had a moment in the final days of Sun, but ever since Oracle got their hands on it it’s been pretty much strangled to death, it seems.
A friend of mine works for a very large international bank – in addition to Linux and Windows, they have significant production loads on HP-UX, AIX and Solaris.
Solaris was my primary desktop machine in 2007-2011 in a corporation I worked then. The company moved developers to Windows during 2011. I never saw Solaris again since then.
“Does anybody still legitimately use any of the variants of Solaris? It certainly had a moment in the final days of Sun, but ever since Oracle got their hands on it it’s been pretty much strangled to death, it seems”
I work in a CS department. We still use many Solaris machines and have provisioned new ones in 2022. Solaris 11.4 is extremely solid and ZFS is the most robust filesystem I’ve used. I wouldn’t put it in place as an end-user desktop machine, but as a behind-the-scenes general purpose server, especially when one needs to export filesystems, it’s still a great choice. Full support until 2034 is also a major consideration.
But, Thom’s question was about Solaris variants. I try to keep an OpenIndiana VM around to play with, but from my perspective, what Oracle did to Solaris when they bought Sun effectively killed off the OSS Solaris variants. It’s too bad, so many great ideas and good technology. At least with so much of it being open source, the ideas live on in other systems. ZFS is widely used in many contexts, and other OSS developers can continue to mine Solaris for ideas, if not code.
TrueNAS is a great example of this. It’s been built on FreeBSD and now Linux but, looking through a certain lens, could be seen as an indirect descendant of the promise of an open Solaris.
As a fun experiment, I ran OpenIndiana for a few months as my main desktop a couple of years back, on a repurposed Dell tower server with a GT 1030 GPU thrown in. It honestly wasn’t a bad experience; it mostly felt like FreeBSD but more “complete” as an OS overall.
As a serious daily OS, I don’t think I could do it long term as some things I use daily just aren’t ported over. Incidentally that’s the same reason I’ve yet to commit to Haiku OS as my daily driver; stability is there now that it’s in beta, but I’m no developer so I don’t know how to properly port software over.
Just out of curiosity, what are you waiting for on Haiku?
Firefox is the main thing, WebPositive just isn’t quite stable enough for daily use. It has certainly come a long way though. I’ve tried Falkon and it also has random crashes, though it works great otherwise.
I’m also looking forward to Pinta coming to the OS, though I don’t know if that will ever happen since it requires a Mono runtime. ArtPaint and AZPainter are decent but not quite up to the task. Support for my color laser printer would be great as well, though I can always print to PDF and physically print that from another OS, but that’s a headache.
Morgan,
This is the software? I had not heard of it before.
https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter
https://azworldweb.wordpress.com/
Is it possible to hook it up as a network printer, possibly inside a VM?
I know it’s lame, but I’ve experienced similar problems after windows upgrades because the products are no longer supported and the newest drivers only support older versions of windows. One workaround is to keep an older version of windows with working drivers around in a VM. Of course another problem is not having a transferable license to run an old version of windows in a VM because they’re locked to the physical machine. Ain’t technology great?
Using Aqemu you could graphically set up a windows or linux virtual machine on haiku rather quick and hassle free.
It is a networked printer, it’s an HP unit that works with CUPS but I don’t believe CUPS has been ported to Haiku yet (if I’m wrong someone please tell me, but it’s not on HaikuDepot). Once CUPS is there, I can manually extract the ppd file from the Linux HPLIP driver, I had to do that to get it working under OpenBSD.
Don’t know about network printers but Haiku uses gutenprint I believe
Agreed. Have said it before Haiku needs a fully compliant browser. In fact, I could effectively use any OS for work if the browser was there. Obviously a lot of work. Nearly seems funny that there is more interest in getting an OS to Win98 level of usability (and run Doom) than to get a browser working. As always in this space, it’s all up to interest – coding browsers is boring obviously.
Interesting, Bhyve is being ported to Illumos. It looks like the Illumos KVM version is old, and they like the Bhyve license better.
Good for Bhyve and FreeBSD. I’m glad it will get some more resources.
https://omnios.org/info/bhyve?
My story is similar.
It’s funny how we often bitch and moan about the mainstream OSes, the evils of Apple or Microsoft.
I’ve given Solaris a run, as well as Haiku and others including the “darkside” alternatives like ReactOS. I really want them to work because my philosophy is diversity brings safety and strength. Yet so many of us have the same experiences with the boutique alternatives. Not that I’d call all Solaris variants boutique, but perhaps that is where they are heading.
But for stuff I need to get working with minimal fuss I always end up back on something like Mint, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, FreeBSD, OpenSUSE or similar just because they have the critical mass to have addressed many of the day to day issues. Sure the boutique variants have work arounds and solutions, or there is a step by step somewhere outlining how the problem has been solved before, that is if you have nothing better to do.
To me the boutique variants are akin to wanting to mow the lawn but you have no mower, so you buy all the pieces in a kit!
What is the Solaris equivalent of an electrified London Double Decker Bus?
SmartOS probably. Maybe OmniOS CE.
https://illumos.org/docs/about/distro/
Solaris is kind of a kit to begin with, and the expectation is to build the environment for the application.
Yeah, that’s kind of the fun of a niche OS. There are challenges there which aren’t present in mainstream OSes.
Meh, i own some vintage sun SPARC hardware. Ultrasparc III and T2. I’ve dealt with solaris quite a bit, and it’s god awful.
Fight me.
No arguments here. Linux really is user friendly when compared to Solaris.