| HP-UX was hard to get started on building software, but once one builds up a base of common libraries, it gets easier and easier, just like it did on Solaris. hp's engineers never broke backward compatibility. The OS is lightning fast and rock solid. That takes a lot of insight and knowledge. redhat constantly brakes things, I find things which work yetsterday that break tody, even in the same mainline release. They couldn't even get shutdown to work correctly, a couple of years back when we were working on integrating XFS (and they were still resisting it), the kernel was panicking because they were trying to write to an unmounted filesystem; that was 18 years into Linux's development. SmartOS engineers would never do such a thing on purpose, as they are guided by the 'empathy is still a core engineering value', put in words in an answer by Keith Wesolowski, and in those very rare cases when they do, they fix it immediately. With redhat we get constant finger pointing between them and the hardware vendor, they never act responsible for anything although we pay them lots of money. What the hell are we paying them for then? They can't even engineer proper code and drivers for their own OS for the hardware they officially support. That's not engineering, that's hacking! The worst by far is their lack of architecture. Take Satellite for example, with their concept of channels: unbelievably confusing and complicated. Have you tried integrating your own RPM's into it? The needless complexity! We had Satellite filling up an Oracle tablespace with irrelevant garbage log information even though we just installed it; I called redhat up and asked them how to lower the amount of information Satellite is generating so that it wouldn't constantly fill up the tablespace. Their support told me that I have to go talk to Oracle because it's an Oracle database problem! Yeah, they are that kind of experts! |