Hacker News Reader

Yes. The software really wasn't all that great. I played a lot with Sun gear and had SGI stuff as well, the polish of the SGI machines vs the 1980's vibe that the Sun gear gave off was on a completely different level. Sun was quality hardware but the software was really a time capsule of what Unix workstations had looked like in the past.

I still feel like we're catching up to SMF.

But yeah, the lack of package manager hurt a lot, and there were competing third-party package managers which had totally different pro's/con's and packages and were incompatible with each other... what a mess.

Compared to apt/yum it was kinda comical... but the first party software really was excellent otherwise.

Not to mention the horrible installer. At that time, Debian and Red Hat installs were super-easy compared to Solaris. And Sun controlled their own hardware stack too!