Hacker News Reader

Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

Early Linux distros were very rough. Remember messing around with modelines in X11 configs?

Sun could've been the "Apple" of x86 Unix: it just works.

I'm willing to bet they couldn't have done that because of the mind-boggling array of 1990s UNIX standards Solaris seemed to support. By the mid 1990s it was clear that the (platform-independent) GNU command line tools were generally superior to what was on Solaris, but presumably they had to keep all the old fossils around to satisfy their long-standing supply / support contracts with industry, defence, and government.

That was my guess back then, and it's my guess now. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong and you know for certain why.

I'm not saying it would've been easy. They could've installed the GNU tools in a different path and left it up to the user to change their preference. They did something similar with putting the BSD tools in "/usr/ucb" (I may have that path wrong.)

that would have required them to swallow their pride, and admit GNU tools were in demand, which didn't fit the marketing narrative.

They could've also just built a real package manager, left it up to the community to add GNU tools. I remember the Solaris package situation being annoying, having to download crap off FTP and install manually. Or often build from source.

Solaris was pretty bare bones, out of the box. I spent days customizing it. Even early Linux distros, like Slackware, were in better shape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCSW was a thing, but yeah go off

Reply on news.ycombinator.com