On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 1:25 AM, Tim Bradshaw <tfb@tfeb.org> wrote:

An interesting approach would be platforms which only supported the standard they purport to conform to (ie there would be no additional functionality at all): such platforms would make porting things more easy, but they would also be mostly indistinguishable from each other and thus eliminate most of the competition between vendors. They would also be impossibly austere of course.

that's more or less what Solaris is doing, and why the defaults seem archaic to people who've only ever used Linux.

You can change the "feel" of the Solaris (by adding/removing/rearranging stuff in $PATH) from SysV (/usr/bin), BSD (/usr/ucb), the "X/Open standard" (/usr/xpg4/bin), to GNU (/usr/gnu/bin). I might have missed some. AIUI /usr/xpg4 mostly exists in order to pass the standards tests ;)

I really despised the "messiness" in Linux where the choice was either stable and outdated to the point of being useless (Debian until they got their act together), stable but patched beyond recognition (anything "Enterprise"), or bleeding edge where entire subsystems can get exchanged at any time without warning (anything "Desktop"). I was clinging to real systems like Solaris and FreeBSD, but eventually I gave up and I'm not looking back. The ease of getting stuff to work (hardware and software) greatly outweighs the lack of elegance and the occasional breakage due to unexpected changes. And there's another kind of elegance in being able to boot Linux on any random PC and have at least graphics, network, and storage work out of the box (most of the time anyway. Solaris never stood a chance on that front). Software gets installed with a simple "yum install foo" or "apt-get install foo" command. At some point Solaris also lost the performance race and that was pretty much it.

I loved Solaris while it was alive and even when it was on life support. Oracle killing Solaris came hardly as a surprise to anyone. The writing has been on the wall for a while, in bold and blinking. I'm only surprised it took so long...