Well, they are probably reacting to what their customers want which, in my experience working at a fairly typical customer up to a couple of years ago, is indeed Linux. That's kind of sad, but Linux, much though I'd like to hate it, is unfortunately both a significantly more pleasant experience as a user & administrator, and a lot easier to hire people for. It's 20 years too late for Solaris to have a future.

I kind of differ here, I know I'm throwing fat into the fire but.... I had to use Solaris at uni when I started my degree 10yrs ago. It was at Melbourne University which DID have a very good computer science programme, you had to learn lots of low-level stuff like C and basic Unix programming, etc. I also used to tutor, and I remember I taught a course about MIPS assembly language using an emulator, which I believe all CS majors had to do. Obviously there was plenty of high-level stuff too (I taught a course on SQL relational algebra and so on), but what I remember is you had to learn Solaris in first year, and you had to basically know your way around the system, I recall there was a course that included a shell programming component too. Well much as I completely agree that graduates should be taught C and Unix, I found Solaris to be a pretty bad platform. I guess the core of my dissatisfaction stems from it being different to Linux, and so I suppose Solaris religious people are going to say "GNU is an ABOMINATION it should NEVER HAVE INTRODUCED LONG COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS and ALL THE TOOLS CONTAIN USELESS FEATURES" and so on... and they are right... but nevertheless I found it much less useable and I felt a lot of the tools had rough edges, as well as changing "mkdir --parents" into "mkdir -p" you had to account for different behaviour which was in most cases more naive. So, because of this the sysadmins had installed a whole boatload of GNU tools into places like /opt/gcc-(VERSION) or /opt/coreutils-(VERSION), and if you had to use a specific feature of say, "ls" or "find" or "sort" that wasn't in the Solaris tool, you had to exhaustively list the long pathname to the GNU tool in your script. The sysadmins did this kind of piecemeal in the system's scripts like .profile and the result was basically a total mess, I don't know how you would have explained all this to a naive student. Not to mention that the directory structure of the student servers had involved into a huge mess over a decade or more with lots of stuff installed in weird places that was referred to in the course material that the teachers had developed, i.e. our IP investment relied totally on this strange Solaris installation. I gather that the coursework has been significantly dumbed down now with the introduction of the so-called "Melbourne Model", it was very controversial at the time, but basically means you learn only dumbed down stuff at undergraduate level, and to get a real degree you have to do a Masters at least. I believe the Solaris student servers are still running but I don't think the coursework uses them anymore, it's all Python- and web-based now. When my sister did the course recently all her assignments were done by logging into a website and running a Python-based IDE via the website which would run her Python scripts and show her the results right there in the browser. Hmm. So I digress but anyway, I would have taken the opportunity to change all the coursework to refer to a Linux student server with all the normal tools installed in the expected places. I always found the Solaris system to be pretty much like stepping back in time. And I do not really understand why corporations would want to run Solaris when Linux is vastly more developed. I guess maybe they have a big investment in Solaris based tools and networks (perhaps stuff like Sun Grid Engine), but I would think it would be easier to port all this to Linux than to continue bashing one's head against a brick wall in trying to get this outdated and proprietary system to become modern. Much as I love BSD I feel that much the same argument applies to FreeBSD as well, it will simply never be as developed/mature as Linux. cheers, Nick On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 1:40 AM, Arthur Krewat <krewat(a)kilonet.net> wrote:

On Fri, Jan 20, 2017, at 06:24, Joerg Schilling wrote: I think his assertion is that he personally had originally learned the command as "mkdir --parents" [which was and is GNU-only], and had to change to spelling it "-p" when going to non-linux systems, along with some unspecified behavior differences.

On Fri, 20 Jan 2017, Joerg Schilling wrote: I blame GNU rather than the Linux people. GNU are just as much masters of "embrace, extend, exterminate" as Microsoft. I've thought of trying to build a "GNUless" Linux distribution with a purer Unix feel, but I get hung trying to step myself through the process. -uso.

On Friday, January 20, 2017, Tim Bradshaw &lt;tfb(a)tfeb.org <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','tfb@tfeb.org');>> wrote: I understand that Linux can still be called a new kid on the block, but it is actually not "a new platform" anymore. It has been deployed (along with FreeBSD) in large corporations for around 20 years now. It really became the Standard OS from embedded world to supercomputers. Personally I do not find this to be a bad thing, because with OS standardization comes uniformity, and I would rather have one true Unix standard than hundreds of incompatible ones. I believe that the future of proprietary UNIX is doomed and the only remaining choices for server operating systems will be Linux and Windows in the near future. If you think about it, the future is already here... --Andy

On 20 January 2017 at 11:30, &lt;tfb(a)tfeb.org&gt; wrote (in part): As they say, 'ave a laugh, guv: http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=43781 N.

On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 1:25 AM, Tim Bradshaw &lt;tfb(a)tfeb.org&gt; wrote: 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...

On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 12:32 PM, Arthur Krewat &lt;krewat(a)kilonet.net&gt; wrote: I've used Solaris 2.5.1, 8, 10, and 11 extensively. The pkg command was cool (and so was blastwave's pkg-get before pkg was incorporated into the base system), but it was always some kind of "poor-mans" yum/apt-get (with occasional manual surgery required to make stuff work). I've booted Solaris 11 on a slew of servers and PC's since it came out. that wasn't my experience. HW support in Solaris 11 was orders of magnitude better than older versions, especially (and surprisingly) on laptops, but any random network card or SATA/SAS controller (if it wasn't 3com/Realtek/Intel/LSI) had a good chance of not working out of the box, or at all. Solaris 11 had a lot of cool, even "linux-y" things, but it was too little, too late, and Oracle immediately killed whatever velocity they had when they took over. But at this point, we were already actively getting rid of it anyway (10 was the last version we deployed in production before jumping ship).

Andy Kosela &lt;akosela(a)andykosela.com&gt; wrote: |On Friday, January 20, 2017, Tim Bradshaw &lt;[1]tfb(a)tfeb.org[/1]&gt; wrote: \ |And it's also why they slowly die: their market ends up being people \ |who have |huge critical legacy systems which they need to maintain, not people \ |who are building new systems.  Indeed even the people with the great \ |legacy chunks |of software, when they build new systems, start using the shiny new \ |platforms, because the shiny young people they hire to do this like \ |the new |platforms. | | [1] javascript:_e(%7B%7D,&#39;cvml&#39;,&#39;tfb@tfeb.org&#39;); (Couldn't resist, sorry.) |I understand that Linux can still be called a new kid on the block, \ |but it is actually not "a new platform" anymore.  It has been deployed \ |(along with |FreeBSD) in large corporations for around 20 years now.  It really \ |became the Standard OS from embedded world to supercomputers. | |Personally I do not find this to be a bad thing, because with OS standardiz\ |ation comes uniformity, and I would rather have one true Unix standard |than hundreds of incompatible ones. I am really glad with the POSIX standard, that, if in doubt, not few members of this list have anticipated in. And if it is that they have thought or implemented the foundations that lead to POSIX. Note that i am really happy with it, but without it nothing but ISO C would be there. And then i would rather boot a Plan9/9front/(9atom) system and adore so much the manuals that have been written by the really good ones. And if just for the spirit from in between the lines. |I believe that the future of proprietary UNIX is doomed and the only \ |remaining choices for server operating systems will be Linux and Windows \ |in the |near future.  If you think about it, the future is already here... Not to start throwing with something that stinks, but in practice my resource files from FreeBSD 4.7 are still in use for 10.3. I never setup a server as such until January 2016, and i had a FreeBSD one running via inetd on one afternoon. And in general one thing that i for one would never overestimate is the documentation, and even though Linux has so much improved, the /usr/share isn't there, which is think is a real pity for young programmers, which may possibly never access doc.cat-v.org. Maybe they have a good professor. And the release information of FreeBSD and also OpenBSD really is appreciated so much by someone like me, who has neither time nor interest to stay totally up-to-date regarding Linux kernel and GNU userland development! --steffen

Kay Parker &lt;kayparker(a)mailite.com&gt; wrote: |I'm running fedora25 beside my Linuxmint 18.1 installation. fedora25 |means fully featured systemd and wayland on the top of the super fast |Linux (kernel) 4.9. |Linux thats were the story goes. Solaris etc. just running behind in the |past. Well i am currently running Alpine on the server (i can't recall the name of the init system they use at the moment, it is what Debian had and Gentoo i think still has; i don't like it, e.g., it cannot perform proper restart if one of the processes fails to stand up again, you have to start them all one by one, then, which is -- let aside how complicated it is to program and maintain such an init system, it is a science! -- mysterious to me given that it gets the dependencies right in normal conditions, and has so much state laying around; and note it will run FreeBSD again at some later time, it was just that i haven't really cared for Linux since i have discovered FreeBSD 4.7, and really felt i need to learn about it again after so and so many years, and then it was 2016, and it was clear what that would mean, and then it was David Bowie, etc. And CRUX-Linux, which is totally underrated, and uses a wonderful unagitated BSD-like approach, i'm looking forward for their new 3.3, in a not too distant future! And VoidLinux, which has a very fine package manager and uses runit, which i think is a really pragmatic, smart, and very small, init system that also is completely underrated. I hope all these systems can survive the very way their developers drive them up the road. I couldn't say, i really love the BSD way, but of course the Linux kernel is _so_ supportive, i really like CRUX. And Void, it is not even graphical no more by default. ArchLinux i have, too, in fact it is my main system since my main machine died. Arch uses systemd. Yes, i don't like systemd. Void is even more surfing the edge than Arch as of today, isn't that amazing? It has a shutdown time of 1 second. Linux wales 4.8.13-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Dec 9 07:24:34 CET 2016 x86_64 GNU/Linux Linux irish 4.9.5_1 #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Jan 20 14:48:47 UTC 2017 i686 GNU/Linux --steffen

On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 07:09:00PM -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote: OpenRC. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC khm

Wesley Parish &lt;wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz&gt; wrote: I would be happy if we had a commonly accepted OSS line for OpenSolaris development. The current problem is that the payers in that game all have commercial interests and removed many parts from the sources that they believe are not needed anymore. Another problem is that the closed source i18n parts of libc in Illumos have been replaced by a FreeBSD implementation version that is not POSIX compliant. So for today, there is development but only in order to meet particular interests. Jörg -- EMail:joerg@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schilling(a)fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/