Why duck, it's true. Solaris with ZFS and zones makes the rest look like buggy whips. When Nexenta makes it to final, the war will be over. The daily bombardment of viruses and crap has taken it's toll, better to switch than fight.
M$ is losing their grip, they announced that the office file formats will go open source next year, can media player be far behind?
It's not just ZFS and zones. Another great feature is Solaris Service Management Facility which significantly increases in uptime. But it is DTrace that is the crown jewel of Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris.
DTrace is such an achievement its creator, Bryan Cantril was selected by MIT's Technology Review as one of its TR35, the top 35 innovators under the age of 35.
DTrace is most likely what drove Oracle back to Solaris from Linux as their primary UNIX development environment.
Oh, and Solaris is Open Source, as well.
Linux works extremely well as a mid range web server. I have more professional experience working on Sun/Solaris, but these were in super-power high octane corporate business apps. When you are paying for the hardware and software out of a tight budget, I wouldn't smirk at Linux. It has come a very long way.
HP-UX, Solaris and IBM's various flavors will continue to market towards those kind of titanic applications. But there is a juicy mid-range market that linux works very well for and has adapted its design to attract universities, local government and startups.
If you have time, take a gander at this site....
http://distrowatch.com/