Nexenta combines OpenSolaris, GNU, and Ubuntu

You have to admire the Nexenta folks for taking on this task- this is some seriously large ambition. I've always wondered why the proprietary Unixes were so slow to improve, especially when their market share is disappearing in large chunks to both Linux and Windows. They're no good at bullying and extortion like Microsoft, so all they have left is creating better products and services. Features like dependency-resolving installers, wider hardware support, and a set of useful administration tools and commands are something Linux users take for granted, but which are inexplicably still missing from Unixes. It's not enough to say "here is a super duper turborcharged engine, all you need to do is provide the chassis, transmission, seats, steering, and brakes."

agreed. The kernel is actually a decent piece of work (unless you're talking about hardware support). I don't understand why they don't concentrate on what they're good at and borrow the rest like a decent package management system apt-get/yum/emerge/(rpm?). Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

[Open]Solaris has ZFS. [Open]Solaris has DTrace. Linux has...? There *is* some improvement in there. Unfortunately OpenSolaris has license incompatible with GPL and because of that I'm not likely to be using ZFS anytime soon [and, man, I'd like to!] :'(