Solaris 10 - an alternative

I've been spending a lot of time with Solaris lately, specifically with Solaris 10 on x86 and x64 machines.
Aside from a few patching nightmares which I would not wish on my worst enemy (well, ok, maybe I would), as a whole I'd say the experience has been good. It's worth bearing in mind that I'm normally an OpenBSD user and administrator, so I'm not exactly scared of the command-line (I actually prefer it!). I'd suppose that even basic UNIX administration would be pretty scary for most, but on the whole, Solaris 10 keeps you away from the command-line, which is pretty cool.

I've also spent quite a lot of time with the various Solaris development tools lately, mostly the Sun Studio 11 C++ compiler, mdb debugger and libumem memory allocator. These are some of the more impressive tools I've worked with, and although the C++ compiler still struggles with the more modern aspects of C++ (support gets better with every patch), just this subset the development suite gives a developer some very powerful tools which just don't exist on other platforms.

All for free.

Yep, free. Solaris 10 is free for download, as is Sun Studio 11. Solaris itself (post Solaris 10) is now Open Source, so it's free-as-in-speech as well, which means that you get full access to some really well written code (if that's your sort of thing).

So now I have an alternative to OpenBSD and Windows on my desktop, and most importantly, since Solaris runs Oracle I can campaign to use Solaris on my work computer as well (my PowerBook can handle that Microsoft Exchange problem quite nicely).