mouldy.org

Obviously you've had a run-in with some Solaris zealots. In exactly the same way as the Linux community has rabidly anti-Sun/Solaris members, some in the Solaris community are quite anti-Linux. It's hardly a majority, though, so just don't antagonise them and/or ignore them :)

That said, I'm surprised you had stability issues with Solaris. I'm running it on a number of non-Sun machines here (most of the mjust thrown together from whatever bits I have lying around) without any stability problems whatsoever. The only time in the last year that any of the machines has had any unplanned downtime was when a circuit breaker tripped. I suspect your problems come from using non-official Solaris distributions - I've briefly tried Nexenta and found it to be very unstable, having both application and kernel crashes. I don't know what they've done to the kernel, but it's massively worse than "vanilla" OpenSolaris.

The supported hardware list is smaller than Linux, but has quite good coverage of server hardware. Even, yes, SATA. It supports JMicron, Sil, and AHCI controllers, which make up a huge chunk of the market.

Regarding ZFS, I won't disagree that the non-Solaris implementations are horribly buggy. It'll be interesting to see if Apple can break the trend. But you can't say ZFS is buggy based on 3rd-party implementations. That'd be like saying Windows is buggy because Wine has problems (OK, bad example). The Solaris ZFS implementation is rock-solid, IME. The machines I'm running have, combined, over 8 TB of data stored in ZFS volumes (mostly raid-z).

Finally, Solaris is no more user hostile than any other *nix. You've clearly got a lot of experience using Linux, so to you Linux seems "easy". Solaris/*BSD/Windows/OSX/etc all do things in their own (different) way, which, once you're used to them, seem just as intuituve and normal as when you're using Linux. I also came from a Linux environment, and initially found Solaris wierd and confusing ("what do you mean, 'top: command not found'?!?!?"). In time, however, I've got used to it, and if anything find it better thought out than Linux.

ZFS is not the universal solution for all file storage. It's not great for large-file sequential access, you can't expand raid-z pools (though this will be fixed Real Soon Now with bp rewrite, which will also allow migration, vdev deletion, and lots more fun stuff), and it can interact in odd ways with some access patterns (particularly databases) to give you poor performance. But I would hardly call it buggy.

If you have the time, I'd recommend that you try one of the official OpenSolaris releases, or even Solaris 10. Hopefully you'll find it nicer to use than the ugly stepchildren (Nexenta et al).

On a completely seperate topic (and the one that orignally brought me here), have you found anywhere where you can get CPLDs or FPGAs at sane prices? :)