I'm sure most of you already know this, but it's funny that no one
mentioned that it used to be known as
SunOS. When they had the name changed, a lot of people
complained about Solaris not being as
reliable as SunOS. They were also
accused of
marketing hype, and with good reason, because soon after, they jumped from
Solaris 2.7 to
Solaris 7. The
Jargon File entry under "
Slowlaris"
explains some of this well.
I've heard that Linux SPARC blows Solaris away in terms of speed, but I have absolutely nothing to back that up.