Sun delivers Unix shocker with DTrace (2004)

theregister.co.uk

19 pointskeeler3 comments

Solaris, towards the end, felt like Sun was working on doing things that excited their internal engineers (zfs, dtrace) while ignoring things that actual Solaris users would prioritise fixing first (awful package management, outdated scripting tools, XML config files, slow CPUs, etc). dtrace was an excellent tech and well ahead of the game, but I knew more people who advocated dtrace than knew how to use it.

I didn't run Solaris in production, but at the time it seemed amazing to me. Thumper's management dashboard looked impressive.

I used ZFS and Boot Environment manager a lot on my personal servers, and it seemed to me way better, easier than what I encountered on other platforms.

macOS of course has virtually no first-party management. Windows has PowerShell and its own universe. I have tried to wrap my head around Windows operations for 25 years. I have never been able to internalize it. Maybe Unix-like thinking has ruined me.

Package management was actually replaced with IPS around the same time DTrace was introduced.

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