Solaris 10 has been EOL since what this time last year? No more updates are going out to it. So if you are still running a Solaris 10 zone then you aren't able to patch it.
Tribblix is unlike Slackware - it uses AT&T SVR4 packaging with zap which is akin to yum on top, whereas Slackware used tape archives. Yes, tape archives for backing up to tape. That says it all.
No pardon - Slackware "packages" were .tar tape archives. The entire "OS" was hacked together out of parts, whereas Peter system engineers Tribblix. No pardon.
Just because "tar" happens to stand for "Tape ARchive" doesn't mean tarballs have anything to do with actual tape archives. It only means that the files are stored sequentially, which is a perfectly reasonable way to structure an archive.
If you want to criticize how Slackware does things, there are myriad better points you could've brought up, like:
- The installer being only minimally changed from that of Softlanding Linux System
- The installer still operating under the notion of "disk sets", from back when it was remotely feasible to install Slackware from floppies (which hasn't been the case in multiple decades now)
- The lack of dependency checking (though having been burned by dependency hell multiple times, I'd call this a "feature")
- The lack of PAM, if that matters to you (though the -current branch now includes it, so Slackware 15.0 probably will, too)
And yet, none of these things have prevented me from being happy and productive with Slackware, both at home and at work, on desktops and servers. It's what I'm running on the very laptop on which I'm typing this comment, on my main workstation / gaming rig at home, and previously on my servers (before I acquired a taste for OpenBSD and SmartOS).
Yes and no - as they lost the University crowd a while ago to Linux, you are pretty much on your own if you want to compile some third party code on Solaris, so while the OS is perfectly viable on a subset of hardware - it's not something you'd either want to install on a laptop or try and build and run random code from github.
