[geeks] operating systems to replace Solaris

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On 4/10/2011 12:06 PM, Shannon wrote:
> I have been putting off replacing my old Solaris system for awhile now, and
> remember some discussion about that here over the last year.
> 
> Some of you guys who replaced Solaris have any comments on what choice you
> made and how it has worked out?
> 
> I am thinking of going back to NetBSD. It ran my personal and business servers
> for years with a lot less fuss than Solaris, so it seems a safe bet.
> 
> The main thing I would miss is ZFS, I really like it a lot.
> 

There is a lot of stuff that I miss from Solaris, though my use case may
be different than yours.  I was running a lot of zones and switched to
Proxmox (proxmox.com) which uses either KVM for whole virtualization or
OpenVZ for Linux-like zones. Solaris IO still seems superior.

> But, ZFS support still seems iffy from what I've read on other systems, and
> the new Solaris license pretty well says I can't use it for what I intend
> without buying it.

> I had bad luck with FreeBSD 6 and 7 so it sorta soured me on it, but it does
> have some features I like. Anyone using 8 and liking it?

8 stills feel weird to me in the way things are named and where files
are located.  Perhaps you could get over it as you have a lot of
experience with NetBSD and I have been tainted with Linux-isms.
Supposedly the 8.1 release had bootable ZFS, which means 8.2 should be
solid - I see the 8.2 release notes added functionality and fixed a lot
of bugs in ZFS....

> The main thing is whatever I move to has to be solid as a rock, no
> experimental stuff need apply.
> 
> I am not currently considering Linux because all the distributions seem fairly
> bloated and I don't like the package systems. Some of them seem to put very
> heavy dependencies even on basic server packages that are, or should be, all
> text.
The only one to consider would be Debian in that case.