alt Hacker NewsI submit that the problem was Solaris 9 just being massively overtaken by desktop Linux in every way - easier to install, faster, simpler to patch, better GUI, more software available. Solaris 10 was too little too late; it already had to compete with mature Linux offerings that had a greater mindshare, and the excellent features like Zones were too far ahead of their time (and lacked the centralized store of downloadable Zone-prepackaged apps that is really the reason for Docker's success).
Purity doesn't matter in practice - especially in a world where OS installations are increasingly ephemeral and ideally immutable.
I always hear DTrace is awesome, but have never used it. And seem to have gotten by just fine... what am I actually missing?
ZFS, on the other hand, was so good that it has outlived Solaris itself and is at the core of e.g. TrueNAS as a commercial product.
Dtrace essentially allows two things. The first is exploring a live system, similar to being in a debugger but without its overhead. The other is monitoring; it's possible to notice that something is wrong earlier and with less overhead than monitoring logs and testing services.
Both aren't strictly necessary/much used in practice for various reasons, but depending on what you're doing, it's very handy to have. In a way similar to ZFS vs Stratis: the first ready to go, well-made, convenient, while the second is an absurd mess made by people who don't understand operations and think they know better from their development machine.
On Solaris... In my opinion, the real problem is less about Slowlaris and more about having chosen to target the élite for so long instead of targeting students, who are the future technicians, managers, etc.
GNU/Linux succeeded IMVHO because it was aimed at this audience, which is much broader, with many who weren't interested, but it's also the group that shapes 100% of every future generation of decision-makers and technicians. When SUN realized this, first with SXDE/CE and then OpenIndiana, it was, yes, damn late.