[jeffbee]

Solaris may have had a handful of helpful features but even by the late 1990s it was obviously inferior in numerous ways to Linux and BSDs. One of the most obvious manifestations of how slow it was was the overwhelming latency of fork, orders of magnitude slower than its free competitors and the reason its ecosystem needed hacked up threads libraries. The system was sprinkled with surprise complexity traps that could kill you in production, including the fact that its TCP receive path was O(N) in the number of IP addresses associated with a given network interface, meaning if you tried to hang an entire subnet off 1 port the system would effectively hang. In 1998 the people I worked with could not run away from Sun quickly enough. As soon as we could port anything to FreeBSD, we did. The writing was on the wall even then.

[pjmlp]

By 2006, Nokia was still mostly a HP-UX and Solaris shop on the networking side, and CERN still had quite a few Solaris boxes, with Scientific Linux project alongside Fermilabs slowly taking off in 2003.

Not everyone was racing to jump out of UNIX proper during the late-1990's.

[jeffbee]

The article specifically discusses Solaris as a gleaming success for web startups in the 1990s. I am here to tell you that as a member of that scene, I would have burned Solaris at the stake if it had a suitable physical manifestation.

[pjmlp]

And I am here to say, I had more fun with Solaris during dotcom wave that ever had, or will, with GNU/Linux.

Same applies to a couple of big UNIX names, with a proper integrated experience.

Pity about that Google Android torpedo.