I predate the Solaris stuff, I'm not a fan. I liked SunOS which was a bugfixed and enhanced BSD. When I wrote the sourceos paper I was talking about SunOS. (I lied, I overlapped with Solaris but I try and block that out)
All that said, Sun had an ethos of caring. In the early days of bitmover amy had some quote about the sun man pages versus the linux man pages, if someone can find that, it's awesome. We keep a sun machine in our cluster just so we can go read sane man pages about sed or ed or awk or whatever. Linux man pages suck.
Sun got shoved into having to care about System V and it sucked. I hated it and left, so did a bunch of other people. But Sun carried on and the ethos of caring carried on and Bryan and crew were a big part of that. My _guess_ is that Solaris and its follow ons are actually pleasant. I'll be pissed if I install it and it doesn't have all the GNU goodness. If that's the case then you are right, they don't get it.
What I expect to see is goodness plus careful curating. That's the Sun way.
I agree that GNU man pages suck. At least the atrocity that was "this man page is a stub, use info for the real docs" is gone now (I don't know if GNU stopped trying to force me to use info, or if distros fix it downstream). I have always hated info and the persistent nagging that GNU docs used to try to make people use it.
SmartOS is nice. I've always thought so and I have a lot of respect for the folks working on it. But, it isn't nice enough to overcome the negatives of being a tiny niche system. Linux has orders of magnitude more people working on it (and many of those people are also very smart). That's hard to beat.
All that said, Sun had an ethos of caring. In the early days of bitmover amy had some quote about the sun man pages versus the linux man pages, if someone can find that, it's awesome. We keep a sun machine in our cluster just so we can go read sane man pages about sed or ed or awk or whatever. Linux man pages suck.
Sun got shoved into having to care about System V and it sucked. I hated it and left, so did a bunch of other people. But Sun carried on and the ethos of caring carried on and Bryan and crew were a big part of that. My _guess_ is that Solaris and its follow ons are actually pleasant. I'll be pissed if I install it and it doesn't have all the GNU goodness. If that's the case then you are right, they don't get it.
What I expect to see is goodness plus careful curating. That's the Sun way.