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Comment by kloch | Hacker News Reader

Pre-1992 it was SunOS and yes that is exactly what we want (without all the security holes).

SunOS was BSD and Nirvana as far as Unix goes. Solaris was SysV and quickly earned the nickname "Slowlaris". For me FreeBSD is the functional descendant of SunOS.

As for Linux I first tried it out in 1993 and was appalled that command line switches for most standard Unix utils had been arbitrarily remapped. Tried FreeBSD 1.0 when it came out and never looked back. Of course I use Linux in AWS and various servers at work and regularly experiment with Linux distros on personal machines but it always feels a bit "off".

I wonder how many other greybeards that cut their teeth on SunOS prefer FreeBSD over Linux today?

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> I wonder how many other greybeards that cut their teeth on SunOS prefer FreeBSD over Linux today?

Not a greybeard but I certainly reach for a BSD when I want to "use Unix".

Linux is a quivering basket case that cant decide if its Unix, MacOS or Windows.

> Linux is a quivering basket case that cant decide if its Unix, MacOS or Windows.

A more positive spin on this would be that it combines the best of all three.

Personally I'm very much in the Unix camp though, and have the proverbial greybeard long enough to trip over. But I can see the value in the "Linux way" of doing things. Actually, I mostly just use Linux myself these days, mainly because of software compatibility and because it's "Unix-y enough" with the right distro; a decent trade-off.

>A more positive spin on this would be that it combines the best of all three.

A more accurate spin would be that it does a half-assed job of implementing features from each but runs off half way to chase after some other shiny feature.

That's the virtue of BSD; it's simple, it's documented it's complete (in features and feature implementation).

> I wonder how many other greybeards that cut their teeth on SunOS prefer FreeBSD over Linux today?

That could be an interesting question. I certainly cut my teeth on SunOS and Irix. I much prefer modern Linux.

I think the Slowlaris moniker was not due to Solaris itself, but the speed of their SPARC processors. I used to work very closely with x86 Solaris for financial trading and it was performant (and stable!) on Intel hardware at the time (circa 2010). At the time Solaris 10 was feee as in beer. When Oracle took over they got rid of this and wanted $1K per CPU socket per year on non Sun/Oracle hardware. Needless to say everything went to Linux rather quickly.

I do prefer FreeBSD over most Linux distros (except Slackware) from a philosophical standpoint.

Slowlaris: /slo'�lahr�is/, n.

[Usenet; poss. from the variety of prosimian called a “slow loris”. The variant ‘Slowlartus’ is also common, related to LART]

Common hackish term for Solaris, Sun's System VR4 version of Unix that came out of the standardization wars of the early 1990s. So named because especially on older hardware, responsiveness was much less crisp than under the preceding SunOS. Early releases of Solaris (that is, Solaris 2, as some marketroids at Sun retroactively rechristened SunOS as Solaris 1) were quite buggy, and Sun was forced by customer demand to support SunOS for quite some time. Newer versions are acknowledged to be among the best commercial Unix variants in 1998, but still lose single-processor benchmarks to Sparc Linux.

The Slowlaris name is much older than that, going back to when they made the switch from BSD to System V in 1991. You could install either the retroactively named Solaris 1.x versions or the new 2.x on the same hardware, and everyone noticed that the new OS was much slower.

It wasn't just old hardware. Upgrading from SunOS to the early Solaris versions on the same hardware was noticeably slower. 2.4 was the first usable version IMO and it improved a lot by the time 2.6 was out (but then they dropped support for older hardware).

I am not sure when Slowlaris term was introduced but I tried OpenSolaris many times on the same hardware that I run FreeBSD and it felt slower for each task ... from the boot process to typical tasks involved.

But I always liked SUN Solaris for its features and solutions.

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