44 engineers on Hacker News describe using Solaris first-hand: 6 endorse it, 6 regret it, 3 are mixed.
“Solaris was lovely, but our E250 was only for mail, and in hindsight we should have stood up a FreeBSD server”
mixed · production · 1 yr · greedo · 2026-04-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After the acquisition I could not reach kernel developers the ones that remained and package management fell into the bog of eternal stench.”
regret · production · LinuxBender · 2025-02-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched on 4GB pages and the week long runs of Scout went to only a few hours. That performance gain was real money and time.”
endorse · production · crackez · 2024-01-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I really loved solaris. Its such a shame how sun worked out.”
endorse · production · cyberpunk · 2023-04-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“One of my favourite systems I've had to work on is running Solaris 2.5.1. Users are added to the program by editing the source code”
mixed · production · hrrsn · 2022-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Solaris 7 was a pretty awesome OS as I recall”
endorse · production · bb88 · 2022-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“high quality which we're so spoiled with in the rest of Solaris and illumos manual pages”
endorse · production · Annatar · 2019-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we had a bad interaction with Sun Microsystems (at the time) and our CEO came down hard and kicked Java to the curb”
regret · production · hermitdev · 2019-09-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've used ZFS in prod for 8 years at least (yay solaris, thumpers, fishworks etc)”
endorse · production · cyberpunk · 2017-03-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Solaris had just come out, which was a buggy mess, and to me wasn't nearly as nice to work with”
regret · production · deerpig · 2017-02-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we begged them to make Solaris x86 a first-class citizen, and we had a lot of support within Sun too but the SPARC Mafia won the day”
regret · production · gaius · 2016-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been able to max out 1 Gbit connection running Solaris 10 on a measly DELL R910.”
endorse · production · Annatar · 2016-07-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It wasn't as bad as Solaris but the overall impression was more similar than I'd like.”
regret · production · acdha · 2012-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“But who'd risk their mission critical systems on an OS the vendor is embarrassed of?”
regret · production · gaius · 2010-07-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The Solaris kernel is excellent. The Solaris 10 userland, not so”
mixed · production · bensummers · 2010-07-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using it in prod since solaris 10”
neutral · production · cyberpunk · 2026-09-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I know it from personal experience using GNU tools on Sun early on (really Solaris in my case, I wasn't quite that early a user)”
neutral · personal · nullc · 2026-05-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We used to be a Solaris shop, and even though we migrated our last Solaris boxes to Linux about 7 years ago”
neutral · production · einr · 2025-05-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it was my responsibility to deal with the solaris hosts from that point forward. we were definitely a sparc shop”
neutral · production · jerrysievert · 2024-10-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“By then, I was using Sun's Solaris as my desktop.”
neutral · personal · simonblack · 2023-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had been using the SunOS and Solaris boxes at work”
neutral · production · bloopernova · 2023-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I switched to a company that used Sun Solaris in production, and it didn't have emacs”
neutral · production · jacobr1 · 2023-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched our internal systems from Solaris to NT.”
neutral · production · unxdfa · 2023-02-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the semiconductor ran on Sun / Solaris / SPARC. We switched to Linux x86 practically overnight in 2002.”
neutral · production · lizknope · 2022-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Everyone had a Sun on their desk and some people also had a Windows PC for MS-Office.”
neutral · production · 10 yr · lizknope · 2022-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I started in the industry when you were born, with IRIX, HPUX (horrible) and Solaris.”
neutral · production · zeruch · 2022-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Company ran on a big Oracle DB on very expensive Solaris machines.”
neutral · production · slotrans · 2022-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use multitude of OS versions ranging from CentOS, to Debian including FreeBSD and Solaris so what do you want?”
neutral · production · doublerabbit · 2022-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We were all using Solaris, HP-UX and Aix boxes when real money was at play.”
neutral · production · pjmlp · 2021-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“until 2005 I only used Aix, HP-UX and Solaris in production.”
neutral · production · pjmlp · 2021-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“have never again after switching to ZFS when Solaris 10 first included it.”
neutral · production · 15 yr · jjav · 2021-06-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Back then it was served from a Sun E4500 running Solaris (7?) and Netscape Enterprise Server.”
neutral · production · mprovost · 2020-07-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Back when I worked with Solaris, I loved SMF”
neutral · production · cthalupa · 2019-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use a mix of KVM and zones (both solaris and lx) for various workloads (around 400 zones/vms).”
neutral · production · cyberpunk · 2017-09-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used NEXT and Solaris before that.”
neutral · personal · myrandomcomment · 2016-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So we did it with Hadoop on two Solaris boxes (18 virtual cores between them).”
neutral · production · virmundi · 2016-09-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been running ZFS in prod since 2008 (on Solaris).”
neutral · production · 8 yr · rodgerd · 2016-06-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Not using docker but zones as a container solution here, but what we do is bake images containing: pkgsrc”
neutral · production · snw · 2015-07-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using unices for over 20 years now (first was ultrix, then truos, sunos, solaris, hpux, aix, linux, netbsd, freebsd, osx)”
neutral · production · 20 yr · GFK_of_xmaspast · 2014-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I will only have one production vm for my app. ... on my shared solaris host.”
neutral · production · tingletech · 2011-09-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“my build script works on solaris and linux so the environment is pretty close between those two by building my own packages.”
neutral · production · tingletech · 2011-09-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“On my systems now, or old Solaris machines I used to admin, I would always do an "at now <script>"”
neutral · production · res0nat0r · 2011-06-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I happend to know that we ran Solaris in prod for these products”
neutral · production · fleitz · 2011-04-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At work, our sysadmin prefers Solaris so everything we run here is Solaris-based.”
neutral · production · neovive · 2010-10-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?