I’ve recently moved away from Linux to Solaris (OpenIndiana more specificly) for my NAS.

Although I like the Linux community, the Solaris one is totally different.1

It’s not a huge community, to me this is part of the appeal. You see a fair amount of the same people in the channels of the respective open source projects and efforts. This is very pleasant.

Overall I find them all to be very helpful!

Not the usually RTFM response you get in some Linux forums or channels on IRC. While for Linux the quickest way to get help is to troll them and say Windows can do XYZ why can’t Linux. Here you just need to ask nicely to be pointed in the right direction. (#solaris is the notable exception to this rule)

Okay you may not always get an answer you like, but it usually is the correct answer 🙂

Here is an awesome example of the helpfulness of the community:

sceenshot of tweets between @h0lzi and @sjorge about adding a ZNC package to OpenCSW

And yes, I did get a nicely packages ZNC out of this. It require some back and forth between me and Jan, but it was a very pleasant experience!

So I’d like to thank you all for the very warm welcome!

If you have an urge to try Solaris, do give into it! But just skip the Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 stuff and get to the good stuff over at the distribution page on the illumos wiki.

Update July 31st, 2012: while working on a comparison of illumos distributions I got this response.

<meth> sjorge: What's up with the OI installer?`  

I replied by kindly stating what I think could be improved, most of those had a incident in there tracker already! Awesome.


  1. I’m talking about the illumos Kernel, Distro’s like SmartOS and OpenIndiana and projects OpenCSW. ↩︎