How come? Our experience with OpenSolaris so far has been headache-y.

I have some limited experience with OpenSolaris, but it has, so far, been good.

I particularly love ZFS and its Linux-ish the package management.

They could have the latest Gnome desktop for the adventurous ones.

We ended up using OpenSolaris for a project specifically for ZFS, plus some related hardware support. I typically use OpenBSD or Debian for most projects requiring a BSD or Linux, so I found myself comparing it to those two systems.

We've definitely had some trouble with getting packages to work correctly, especially when using newer versions of software that were available as packages in the distribution. Most maddeningly though, it's slow. We set it up on a pretty beefy abmx machine, and at its worst it took over 15 minutes to boot.

There is something very wrong with your setup. It should boot within +- 20% of the time taken by Linux on the same hardware.

I know; we just haven't been able to puzzle out what's wrong with it. For now, we have to live with it.

This was a while ago, but IIRC the slowdown was happening at a point in the boot process where logging wasn't helpful at all.

Last time I experimented with OpenSolaris, it seemed as though it was very useful for Java development, but not a whole lot else. It might have changed since then though.

It's a decent Unix OS. It's as comfy as any modern Linux distro.

Much nicer than, say, AIX for a development desktop.

What does it do better than Solaris 10, which seems about the equivalent of AIX or HPUX in terms of installation, package deployment, and toolset maintenance (as little as possible).

A newer Gnome, mostly.

> Much nicer than, say, AIX for a development desktop.

Interesting observation. In what way do you think Solaris is better for dev than AIX?

Gnome.

Last time I used AIX, I used CDE. I assume I could install Gnome (I did it on an SGI, long ago) but I never got to.