That Sucking Sound over there

Christopher Petrilli is not impressed with Solaris on x86:

Yup, one of the single most popular gigabit ethernet chips ever released is not supported. Sun supports, in total, 12 network adapters, and once you filter out the duplicate chipsets and such, it's more like 10. Ten. Ten. Last I checked, FreeBSD supported about 100+, and Linux a comparable number.

Do these people really think they'll displace anyone in the x86 world? Crapy install process, filled with confusing questions and useless prompts, only to get to a fully installed system to find out that in fact your HW isn't supported. That's a fine bit of code for you.

Maybe there's something amazing inside Solaris 10, but I'll never know since I won't fork over stupid amounts of money for a Sun box. And please don't point me at the Sun Blade 100, as I've had one, it's insulting slow. 386/33 running BSDI slow. For $1k, I expect at least passable.

So long, farewell, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Kind of puts this in perspective, doesn't it?.

Update: Andrew Binstock of SD Times makes some good points about Solaris vis-a-vis Linux, but - and this is critical - the negatives that Christopher outlined above are of far greater importance. If you can't get the system installed, or once it's installed it can't see the network - it's useless