
With a (relatively) big advertising campaign SUN promoted Solaris 10 (also known as SunOS 5.10). Referring to SUN, with the "revolutionary" JAVADesktop 2 and a lot of new features and improvements, Solaris 10 should be the best OS today. Solaris is free for SPARC owners and for private use or evaluation purpose it's also freely available on the x86. While Solaris actually is kind of a legend, I thought "Hu, this could be an interesting alternative on my PC". Thought, went on and downloaded the ISOs. Read on to see how an average user (me) have experienced Solaris.
The real question is why you should use x86 instead of a modern processor (SPARC, PowerPC...)
The real answer is because you can get similar and sometimes better performance at a fraction of the price. Backwards compatibility with all that x86 software is a big plus, too.