Best Unix?

[wizard at neonedge.com (Wizard)]

> IRIX runs on SGI ...

NOTE: I have never really spent much time on IRIX.
   I cannot speak first hand, but I have heard that IRIX is most-definitely
a specialty UNIX, in such that it really requires understanding IRIX in
particular to administrate. From what I have heard, an admin with Solaris,
HP-UX, Tru64, or Linux experience will not make the migration as easy as
with moving among the others. I have no idea why this claim has been made,
and it may be inaccurate. This difference, however, could potentially mean a
more secure box.
   From everything I've heard though, it is a real graphics machine and
quite often used for things such as 3D CAD/modeling and other texture
mapping apps.

> I also looked up Jerry's favorite, Tru64.

   Coming from a genomics company, I can say that the Tru64 clustering is
superb. The systems seem to take immense abuse and keep right on performing.
It has all the admin tools you'd expect from a typical UNIX, and to the best
of my recollection, everything always worked exactly as expected. The only
issue that I encountered (and it may be different now), was trying to
install the JSERV Apache module on it. At the time, JSERV was not supported
on OSF. I did eventually get it to build however, and even ran it as a DSO
(took a bit of hacking, though).
   Because of the cost, however, they are most often only used for
scientific applications with heavy computational/floating point loads. This
is where they really excel.

> HP-UX (not mentioned)
   These are fast becoming the workhorse of the industry. A great
general-purpose POSIX platform, they are generally fast, and seem to release
OSs without much in the way of compatibility problems (unlike Sun). If I
needed a box for a high-availability intranet or enterprise database, I
think I would choose one of these.

> Solaris (also not mentioned)
   These are a fairly popular, and I really am not sure why. Although
they're really isn't anything that I can think of that is inherently bad
about them, they never really impressed me. When we upgraded some boxes to
Solaris 8 we had several compatibility problems that were rather
frustrating. Here's a document from Sun's own admin support site called
FixSolaris8, an update for the previous FixSolaris for version 2.5.1:
http://fixsolaris.sunhelp.org/fixsolaris8.txt

> Linux (ditto)
    Even I have to admit that it is unfounded, but I still don't think of
Linux as a Unix OS. Although I could likely login to a new Linux box and not
notice that it wasn't a Unix (given that I was using a shell), I still don't
know that I would choose it for anything that I thought to be
mission-critical. I honestly think it makes a great desktop, and should be
used to replace all of those Windows boxes out there. I even wrote an
article about it for DesktopLinux.com.
   As far as my prejudices go, it's probably because I have run into so many
problems using the admin tools, and those tools are not the same way I would
admin a typical UNIX box, where I would be more likely to use tools from a
shell rather than the GUI stuff. So I really do like Linux, I guess I just
don't entirely trust it yet. I'd probably feel differently if I'd never even
tried the GUI admin stuff but just stuck to my typical way of doing things.

Send flames to the list please, not to me directly ;-).
Grant M.