UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

agreed - i know it can be used FOC for development. Problem is though, Intel Solaris (before the branch) has always been picky about the hardware it supported - nowhere near 99% of the PC Workstation market. It's got a lot better now with the advent of open source branching and it's getting better all the time. My comparison to linux was merely from an open source standpoint depending on the hardware/solaris version...

The comparison between linux & solaris is another discusion topic me thinks......

So Solaris 11 Express is just taking good things from Linux world (hardware compatibility), but keeps all the great technologies from Solaris 10, adding even more nice things (Crossbow, IPS, etc). And it still runs on SPARC But saying that Solaris 11 Express is (and I quote) "a similar league to linux" is a big misunderstanding.

Several have pointed out that we seem to be ignoring the matter of cost. In fact, TCO is one of our main motivations.

We have been a strictly Linux shop. Over the years, we have gathered the impression from colleagues using commercial Unixen that we were spending much more time on maintenance and recovery than they were.

Since workstation use has fallen dramatically over the past decade, you can find some really good deals on second-hand IA64/POWER workstations. As for licenses, Solaris is free for noncommercial use, and HP-UX and AIX licenses are tied to the machine.