All UNIXes have good and bad points (Score 2)

Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, AIX, IRIX, HP/UX... I've used them all and they all offer neat features. Religious zeal is nice but in the end you can do the job with all of them pretty nicely (even W2K, sometimes [dons asbestos suit]). They all have drawbacks, too, but those tend to get exagerrated. For the x86 world (i.e. the "affordable" way of getting Unix on your machine) we have the BSDs, Solaris and Linux (and SCO, which I never liked). Linux is the most bleeding-edge one and seems to be becoming the de facto standard, for better or for worse - like the M$ of Unixes, in a way. Things like Beowulf, ReiserFS, XFS and most other interesting open source (and some other, pretty expensive) projects are written for Linux first. If enough decent projects get completed, the other x86 Unixes will have a hard time finding homes in hard drives. For a stable environment, at the moment I would recommend Solaris or FreeBSD. Solaris 8 performs well if set-up properly on PC hardware (I set it up with DMA enabled and a combination of RAID 0 and 1 and it screams). Also, you can get software mirroring of the / filesystem which, unless I'm wrong, you cannot with Linux/FreeBSD. However, low-level benchmarking I did with lmbench proves FreeBSD to be faster in things like pipe bandwidth and process forking. Linux is fine but, out-of-the-box it lacks reliability/performance features (i.e. the way it does only fully-async data+metadata writes [or fully-sync both, which slows things down terribly], which can cause long fsck sessions if there's a problem... NFS and TCP/IP under heavy load...) that are not big issues with other OSes (you can choose the behavior in a more fine-grained way with Solaris or FreeBSD). I'm sure future kernel releases will solve most of these issues. Ideally, I'd like to see full native support for the SGI XFS (far superior to ReiserFS and in serious use for a long time now in SGI servers, totally bulletproof IMO) and proper RAID functionality before I consider it ready for prime time. The one thing missing from the Unix world as a whole is a decent desktop but that's besides the point for a server. It will happen, though. But, to get on-topic for once, Unix is far from dead, never even was close, anyway. The issue is not the server market (which it never had a problem in) but the Average Joe desktop one which currently it cannot rule for a myriad reasons. However, that's the way to get the biggest market share: M$ first totally dominates the desktop, creates its proprietary and often silly stuff, changes/breaks well-established standards so that they only work 100% with M$ OSes, then makes server OSes that everyone buys by default. It always wins. Oh, and in countries where software anti-piracy laws are not enforced (i.e. everyone else but the USA and a FEW other countries), software cost is never an issue so if someone wants to deploy W2K AS (which normally costs around $4K a pop so it's never an option for normal-income, law-abiding citizens and small companies) to load-balance 30 machines or make a failover cluster of 2, they can do it for the cost of burning CDs. Setting it up for load balancing and doing software RAID of any partition you want is easy as pie and if it doesn't cost you a cent apart from the hardware, try convincing the CEO to go for Unix, especially if him and the rest of the tech team are tech/Unix-phobic/inexperienced. Most people like that want something easy to set up and fairly reliable. They don't care if they can get slightly less downtime and a bit more performance running Solaris, (which for $75 you get unlimited licences for, so cost is again not an issue), FreeBSD or Linux. For a techno-geek this is silly, but these are real people making real decisions I'm talking about. I believe it all boils down to: Unix has the strength in core functionality. Give it easy installation and configuration for EVERYTHING, a standard, decent, easily configurable desktop, decent free apps, and we're all home free. It's all starting to happen, anyway. And sorry for the long post, which probably nobody will read but it's my first so there. D