Solaris 10 really was the pinnacle of UNIX. At a previous company, we were doing with Solaris zones and ZFS snapshots essentially a docker-like development ecosystem. We were really excited about the crossbow networking project, but then the Oracle acquisition happened almost all new and innovative work stopped.
In a more perfect world, Joyent would have become bigger than it was. Alas...
I'll assume that was a typo and you meant Solaris 11. Solaris 11 has some amazing advancements over 10 in terms of security, packaging, and many other metrics.
Also, for the record, it is objectively untrue that all new and innovative work stopped. My primary disappointment was the silent discontinuation of the OpenSolaris project.
No, I meant 10. The same way you might say that the McLaren F1 is the pinnacle of car engineering, despite higher performing cars being subsequently released.
The delta between what you could get between Solaris 10 and
most anything else at the time (free or otherwise) was very impressive. Zones/containers had little equal (maybe FreeBSD jails, but so much nicer to manage), ZFS made me almost cry that I’d never have to deal with veritas again, and DTrace allowed safe, live debugging whenever I felt like it. I’d add SMF there somewhere if it wasn’t configured via XML.
Sure, IPS is technically superior to apt or yum (well, anything is better than yum), but it’s not ground breaking better than what you have elsewhere. 11’s security is indeed improved as they took what was already done of crossbow, and implemented it, then cancelled the rest.
I was using hyperbole, but the general feeling to those of us that were customers was of a large cutback in work. And that was before oracle jacked up the prices.
I miss Solaris, but there is no reason I would recommend it to anybody today, even if you had to manage your own hardware and not be on a major cloud vendor.
Then we're going to have to agree to disagree; because the next Solaris release went all the way to 11 ;)
As for 11’s security is indeed improved as they took what was already done of crossbow, and implemented it, then cancelled the rest. -- that's shortchanging an incredible amount of work that was done that was not related to crossbow at all. Crossbow, while great, was hardly the largest or most important project that was being worked on although it was certainly one of them.
In a more perfect world, Joyent would have become bigger than it was. Alas...