Solaris is still a thing, even though it’s now developed by a company nobody likes and seems to have lost all of the momentum among enthusiasts, so much so that I doubt anyone will even really care about this news item. Oracle released Solaris 11.4 almost three years ago, and is still updating it with monthly updates. Solaris 11.4 SRU30 is the latest one, released on 16 February.
The update consists mainly of updates from upstream packages, but there seems to be little in the way of new features or big improvements. For those, we have to most likely wait until Solaris 11.5 or 12.0, if Oracle ever makes it that far with the formerly open source operating system that they closed back up.
I don’t think it’s (just) because it’s a company nobody likes. It’s because as far as I know getting updates like this requires an Oracle support contract, which basically locks enthusiasts out. Oracle aren’t a company that’s set up to handle a support contract for a single node run by an enthusiast – their position is that enthusiasts don’t need updates but production servers do, and restricting updates is a way to ensure anyone using Solaris in production pays up. It may prevent people running Solaris in production without paying, but it also turns away a lot of enthusiasts too.
Also, I thought Oracle had basically confirmed no Solaris 12 by saying they were operating on a continuous release model. That happened at the same time as the layoffs, so the real question now is whether it’s a no release model. Updates like this are basically to components Oracle didn’t develop in house, although that obviously raises the question of why anyone would pay Oracle to get them.
I was really interested in OpenSolaris back in the day. We had several people in our computer science department trying it out. And even with the terrible Java based UI, we wanted to give it a chance,
Then Oracle happened…
Are you referring to the Java Desktop System? That was Gnome 2.
Yes, it was based on Gnome. But they somehow made it slower. If I recall correctly, Linux one the same machine had a much faster desktop experience.
This was most likely to your hardware not supporting 2d acceleration. GPU support on OpenSolaris was quite poor, even for common equipment. As a result, the desktop experience was a lagfest for most equipment it was tried on.
With a supported GPU, it was as fast as any other compilation of Gnome 2. They even added some neat things to Nautilus like integrating ZFS features into an Apple Time Machine like interface. Gnome2 and their Nimbus GTK2/Metacity theme was pretty awesome and pointed to a neat future if it wasn’t destroyed by Oracle.
I was a huge OpenSolaris fan and was starting to use it in my places of work and for personal cases. (hell.. I have *real* OpenSolaris CD’s around here somewhere) Crossbow networking, zones, zfs, all awesome tech.
Then Oracle happened. I LOL NOPE’ed right out of that position on day one of the buy-out. Looking at what Oracle did to the Solaris community within the first year i’m really glad I got off that sinking ship when I did.
Back when Linux was stilla mess but gaining momentum I tried Solaris and decided all things being equal I preferred Solaris to Linux. If Sun had changed their licencing in time perhaps solaris would have been the default today. Alas, not. Yes I still pine for Solaris but not under Oracle management and the Linux mess remains dominant and I don’t see Linux “management” aligning with my worldview anytime soon.
For better or worse, given the state of FreeBSD nowafays where it as a lot of the same/similar technologies, there’s little value in solaris for most users. A pity, there was a time when solaris was even open sourced I believe.
Solaris 11 is what it is. Oracle switched to a rolling release with 11.4, which was a renamed upgrade to what had been planned to be Solaris 12. Desktop-wise (which few people actually use) it moved to Gnome 3, broke _many_ older packages, and generally moved Solaris to where it needed to be for Oracle to run it in maintenance mode until 2034. Around the same time, Oracle laid off a lot of seasoned Sun engineers, which certainly makes their long-term intentions for the OS clear.
I administer about a dozen Solaris machines still. Many are our core servers. I have been slowly migrating away from Solaris mostly to Linux. The further along I get down this path, the more respect I have for the Sun engineers that developed Solaris and the slower the migration goes. Still in 2021 there are some stellar Sun-developed technologies that feel years out for Linux. And then there’s support. Oracle extended Solaris 10 (released in 2005) support for an additional 3 years to 2024. I know for sure that I can run Solaris 11 on servers until 2034. By contrast, IBM/Red Hat pulled the rug out from under everyone when they killed off CentOS 8 out of nowhere.
For my purposes, Ubuntu is the best option for deploying new Linux servers, but 5 years for support isn’t great. Sure, Red Hat gets you ~10 but RHEL/CentOS 8 is still buggy and RHEL major release upgrades are still a hope for the future. Meanwhile, my Solaris boxes keep plugging away with solid security updates and a stellar filesystem.
OpenSolaris was great; a real missed opportunity. At least that technology is open source. All of the development in Solaris 11 feels like a developmental dead-end. Such is life.