<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>romaniitedomum</author><text>&amp;gt; you know that even if the tech is inferior (coughbtrfscoughsystemtapcoughsystemdcoughepoll*cough) many other people are in the same boat and in theory hordes of developers will -- might? -- make patches to fix the problem.&lt;p&gt;Bit of a bad cough you have there! Need a lozenge?&lt;p&gt;With regard to technology, Solaris&amp;#x2F;Illumos went through the same init system battle with their next-gen init system SMF as GNU&amp;#x2F;Linux did with systemd. They had their share of hard-nosed refuseniks who vowed to remain on Solaris 9 forever rather than embrace the new. Lennart Poettering said that systemd was inspired in part by SMF[1].&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;coreos.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;qa-with-lennart-systemd.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;coreos.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;qa-with-lennart-systemd.html&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>mapgrep</author><text>I really hope users and developers can embrace the amazing technology that is present in illumos and its derivatives, much of which came out of Sun Solaris.&lt;p&gt;Things like ZFS, Zones, DTrace, SMF, and Crossbow were locked up inside Sun Solaris for many years because it was proprietary. The effort to open source it took a long time and because of how Solaris was built (with various third party things) Sun essentially had to release under a slightly odd license, the CDDL.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile Linux, which had ascended to dominance post dot com bubble, solidified its lead as the defacto default server operating system, a fairly well earned dominance built on being the first truly free Unix available for x86&amp;#x2F;PC hardware, and at a time when that was a truly lesser tier of hardware (unlike today).&lt;p&gt;But today I worry we&amp;#x27;ve settled into a mindset of &amp;quot;the linux way is best because it is dominant&amp;quot; - if you use linux you can google your stack traces, you know that even if the tech is inferior (&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt;btrfs&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt;systemtap&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt;systemd&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt;epoll*cough) many other people are in the same boat and in theory hordes of developers will -- might? -- make patches to fix the problem. No one ever got fired for choosing linux, basically.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve migrated a bunch of personal projects to a server I own running SmartOS, an Illumos derivative. One thing I&amp;#x27;ve learned is that it&amp;#x27;s actually really viable and nice these days to use an alternative operating system. I imagine it&amp;#x27;s similar with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, vanilla Illumos, etc. These systems run on a pretty impressive array of hardware and are able to leverage the near total standardization of the hardware&amp;#x2F;bios stack and the inroads made by other projects to bootstrap to viability. E.g. SmartOS uses pkgsrc from the netbsd project for packaging, took some boot technology from FreeBSD, and in general is able to tap into the universe of &amp;quot;unix like&amp;quot; tools, even if many of those tools are most often used on linux.&lt;p&gt;Anyway if you get a chance give this stuff a spin, it&amp;#x27;s pretty eye opening what you can accomplish. Zones, to me in particular, feel like a game changer.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Illumos is a Unix operating system which provides next-generation features</title><url>https://www.illumos.org/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>peatmoss</author><text>Vehemently agree. Monoculture is a huge risk to IT generally right now. I love Linux and must use it for some things, because nothing else is really supported, but I really worry about a world where all the servers run Linux.&lt;p&gt;I think the thing I miss most about the 90s and early 00s was that different unix-like systems took big, bold, and divergent approaches. Computing felt less “nailed down”... like there were more possibilities.</text><parent_chain><item><author>mapgrep</author><text>I really hope users and developers can embrace the amazing technology that is present in illumos and its derivatives, much of which came out of Sun Solaris.&lt;p&gt;Things like ZFS, Zones, DTrace, SMF, and Crossbow were locked up inside Sun Solaris for many years because it was proprietary. The effort to open source it took a long time and because of how Solaris was built (with various third party things) Sun essentially had to release under a slightly odd license, the CDDL.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile Linux, which had ascended to dominance post dot com bubble, solidified its lead as the defacto default server operating system, a fairly well earned dominance built on being the first truly free Unix available for x86&amp;#x2F;PC hardware, and at a time when that was a truly lesser tier of hardware (unlike today).&lt;p&gt;But today I worry we&amp;#x27;ve settled into a mindset of &amp;quot;the linux way is best because it is dominant&amp;quot; - if you use linux you can google your stack traces, you know that even if the tech is inferior (&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt;btrfs&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt;systemtap&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt;systemd&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt;epoll*cough) many other people are in the same boat and in theory hordes of developers will -- might? -- make patches to fix the problem. No one ever got fired for choosing linux, basically.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve migrated a bunch of personal projects to a server I own running SmartOS, an Illumos derivative. One thing I&amp;#x27;ve learned is that it&amp;#x27;s actually really viable and nice these days to use an alternative operating system. I imagine it&amp;#x27;s similar with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, vanilla Illumos, etc. These systems run on a pretty impressive array of hardware and are able to leverage the near total standardization of the hardware&amp;#x2F;bios stack and the inroads made by other projects to bootstrap to viability. E.g. SmartOS uses pkgsrc from the netbsd project for packaging, took some boot technology from FreeBSD, and in general is able to tap into the universe of &amp;quot;unix like&amp;quot; tools, even if many of those tools are most often used on linux.&lt;p&gt;Anyway if you get a chance give this stuff a spin, it&amp;#x27;s pretty eye opening what you can accomplish. Zones, to me in particular, feel like a game changer.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Illumos is a Unix operating system which provides next-generation features</title><url>https://www.illumos.org/</url></story>