Actually I can and have system engineered ultra-reliable production systems which ran over ten years without issues: I'd come back to work at a former employer and the system would still be there, serving. This was not an isolated scenario.
One cannot build highly available systems and networks on unreliable, lying software. Basic guarantees are required. If one has 10,000 systems and one loses power on even a portion of such lying systems without basic guarantees, no amount of distribution will guarantee data consistency. I'm no stranger to building very large distributed clusters, but those builds start with an operating system and software which do not overcommit and which are paranoid about data integrity and correctness of operation. In fact, I'm specialized in designing such networks and systems, from hardware to storage all the way up to application software.
I just ordered my capacitor kit for re-capping my Amigas.
Anyway Linux won for now, but Solaris lives on vicariously through illumos and SmartOS, which handle this the same way as Solaris does (it's the same code) and the codebase is very actively developed, so it's not over yet no matter how much Linux is winning now: I'm waiting for the folks to figure out just how shitty Linux is under the hood and the fact this is a topic on HN tells me it's starting to happen as people gain more and more experience. Linux won the battle but with such shitty code underneath winning the war as history will judge it is another matter entirely. Meanwhile SmartOS continues to be developed and works correctly in these situations.
Actually most Linux users are blissfully unaware that Linux overallocates memory and of those that know about it, very few understand the consequences to applications (such as data corruption or data loss). I doubt anyone who fully understood the consequences would want to run their infrastructure on something so unreliable and I doubt it because it's logical to me that they wouldn't.
An operating system should never overallocate memory because one cannot build reliable applications and infrastructure on top of a kernel which is lying to the application.
No way, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and IRIX was so very, very advanced. IRIX hasn't been in development for almost two decades now and it's still more advanced in aspects like guaranteed I/O and software management (inst(1M))... What does that say about it and what does it say about the engineers who worked on it?
Shared object libraries are incredibly useful because they save memory and CPU resources. Cloning the process space during a fork(2) call, initializing structures, then context switching and whatnot is incredibly expensive.
I grew up using NetScape under CDE on Solaris and IRIX. I ran a LiveWire (NetScape) web server professionally when the webmaster job was something root did and was an honorable thing to do.
Even with all of that, I boycott Firefox because they no longer support Solaris or his descendent, illumos, and because the Firefox 48 ESR I do run on there crashes all the time, and because Mozilla is extremely aggressively pushing Rust, which is an overcomplicated piece of crap. So long as all these conditions are true, Firefox can go to hell for all I care, and I sure won't be recommending it to anyone. May Chrome and Safari keep winning. Thanks Mozilla for being sellouts and good luck.