Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by veidr 3216 days ago
It was a truly sad day when Oracle bought Sun, because we knew right then that ZFS wouldn't improve nearly as many people's lives as it should have, and that Solaris would die.

The ZFS thing still bums me out to this day, but I think I got over the demise of Solaris when OpenSolaris fizzled out.
3 comments
cturner 3216 days ago
What was cool about Solaris for old-timers? In particular, are there things that compare well against modern BSDs?

My vague memories of it are that the userland showed signs of legacy (/usr/ucb), and I could never get the tools I needed installed. But that was a consequence of the setting I was working in, not Solaris.

It would be particularly interesting to hear from fans of STREAMS or other kernel features.

link
keeperofdakeys 3216 days ago
ZFS is definitely still a thing. With the creation of the OpenZFS project, and the Linux port, the future is looking bright.
link
pron 3216 days ago
It was indeed sad when it became clear that the market is not interested in Solaris, nor in many other Sun products that could no longer be sustained.
link
veidr 3215 days ago
Well "sad" is, of course, entirely subjective.

I personally don't give a shit about Java or MySQL, so I wouldn't have been sad if those products died, but I know lots of people who would be.

For me, it was ZFS that I was really excited about. Back then, I thought I might have ZFS (or some ZFS-derived or -inspired equivalent bitrot-resistant checksumming filesystem) on all my computers and phones by, say, 2017.

But I don't. My Linux box can finally have ZFS (with some caveats), but my Macs and phones can't and won't; it was another sad day (for me) when we learned Apple's "modern" new filesystem, APFS, does not do checksumming for user data[1][2].

[1]: http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14129601

link