[sliken]

I think that must have been common. Nobody good worked in tools. I managed a couple sunos and later solaris boxes. Userspace was a disaster. I ended up replacing it all with GNU and every piece I installed had a warning. Don't use Solaris make. Don't use solaris tar. Don't use the solaris compiler, etc. Ended up having to install gcc from binaries, then build zip, make, etc. Even tail (max 10k lines) and awk (max 16 columns or something) had issues. While debugging even xterm would die if you made it too wide.

Once you replaced the userspace with GNU + X11 the kernel was solid, although SunOS and early solaris didn't multitask well. For some workloads I'd end up disabling all but one CPU.

[luckydude]

So I believe you on the Solaris userspace, it was full of System 5 garbage. GNU was a much better answer.

But on SunOS 4.x, you had userspace problems? That was a pretty stock BSD userspace with a lot of bugfixes. Every open source makefile in the world just worked when you typed make on SunOS. Seemed pretty solid to me, I think the only thing I would do is add perl, it took Sun a long time to decide to include perl (if they ever did).