Linked by Matthias Breiter on Wed 25th May 2005 17:39 UTC
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.
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"Software for Solaris is not widely spread. Of course there are hundreds of terminal applications and of course there are some basic CDE Utilities. And there are those well known applications which are delivered within the JAVADesktop 2. But beyond that Solaris is a lonely system. Of course, if you have a car company and you need an "out-of-the-box" network with mainframe servers, storage farms, clusters, CAD/CAM Workstations and office terminals, SUN+SPARC+Solaris is maybe the right choice. There are some professional and a lot of ultraprofessional applications available. Solaris simply lacks of useful Software for the (home) user. In fact, you get a lot more useful stuff for Linux or even for FreeBSD. "
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There are 2 primary sites for software for Solaris:
http://www.sunfreeware.com/
http://www.blastwave.org/
There is additional software but it isn't in a central location. Typically you have to go to various websites to download software.
As for performance, solaris is configured for stability out of the box. I am not 100 percent sure about solaris 10, however, some things to take a look at are (changing):
1) Threading model 1:1 to m:n
2) Write caching on disks
3) Enabling a form of soft updates or journaling of the file system.
This should tremendoulsy increase performance.