I have been bitten by the buggy iconv provided by Sun many times. A few years ago with Samba on Solaris 9, now again with FreeTDS on top of Solaris 10. It is amazing how bad Sun has been about providing software on top of Solaris. The OS itself might be cool, and ZFS is amazing. However, if you want to do something on this OS, you will quickly need to compile software yourselve.
All Linux distributions are providing ten of thousands of packages, installed with a simple command. On Solaris, expect to spend hours running ./configure and make in iterative mode until you get something running. And then you start again because you forgot to add some “-L -R” and it is now complaining about a missing library. And don’t talk to me about the dreadful Blastwave and OpenCSW. The rule is simple : if you want to build something above Solaris, be ready to become a SVR4 packager.
No wonder why Solaris is dying. The purchase by Oracle wasn’t really needed to kill it. The suicide was written all over the wall long before Oracle even thought about it.
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