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I've had an 11/06 DVD for what seems like forever. I've never been able to get it to install on ANYTHING, it always crashes or hangs.

Been a while since I toyed with Solaris (back with version 9 believe it or not!) but heh, *nix is all the same in reality. At one point I was tempted to get a SPARC server or SPARC workstation. I might just look at one hehe.

Tried Solaris 11. I wasn't impressed, really. It felt awfully slow, both in VM and on real hardware. I'll stick to my Linux distros, thanks.

Solaris 11 is almost identical to OpenSolaris. It's quite fast for server workloads and I've found it's administrative capabilities especially in the IO virtualization and resource management to be brilliant.
Currently nothing compares to ZFS. Sun made an attempt to go after the desktop in Solaris 10, but Oracle realized that people don't actually ask for that and Solaris is right now in it's true place as the best server OS out there.
Linux is brilliant for a lot of things, but it's missing a lot of the features of Solaris.

Okay, point there. However, as a desktop user, I found that any of a dozen different Linux distros were easier for daily use than Solaris 11 was. I haven't heard anything bad about its performance as a server OS, though, so I guess this comes down to intended use scenarios.

But if you take a look at what's new in Solaris 11, there's a lot that simply doesn't matter that much at all for robust mission critical server environments: new X-Server, new Desktop-UI, new repository-based package management

okay the package manager is not just comfortable for the user, but also nice for centralized update rollout inside the company, but why all the GUI-related stuff? Thinking about AIX or HP-UX, which still ship with good old CDE, I find it hard to imagine that spending much time on a beautiful GUI seems worth it in a server environment

beautiful UI? Solaris? if you promise it's beautiful I will download Solaris 11 right away..
no seriously, I have never seen any user interface worth mentioning in Solaris.. even the Java Desktop thing was not beautiful, it looked like the stereotype of a "modern" GUI that a 5-year-old kid would draw if asked (after stripping away any hint of creativity that the 5yo could have put into it)

okay maybe it's not what steve jobs would have considered beautiful, but I think the new GNOME2 with it's theme is worth looking at without having to vomit (like CDE)
my actual point was not a discussion about aesthetics, but rather that they invested work in changing the GUI at all, which I still can't understand from a server perspective

my theory why they did it has to do with larry's statement, that Solaris will be the ultimate OS for Oracle products. Maybe the developers eat their own dogfood and run Solaris 11 on their development machines?

how much work did they truly invest in it? maybe a group of a few interns spent a couple of weeks on the task.. it is not a massive investment and it can have some nice return in terms of publicity: "Solaris, the super-duper-server-os, now with a nice UI"
it would be different if the task actually took several months and it involved Core OS developers doing some serious hacking and design compromises (which, given the nature of UNIX, I do not believe to be true)

or, third alternative, keeping CDE up and running was becoming more and more complicated release after release (bloatware, anyone?) so they decided it was a better option to come up with something newer and easier to maintain for several years to come

of course, taking available open source software as a replacement instead of creating some stuff from scratch is a lot easier, but I believe there's more to it than "oh and we also got some GUI" to please managers in a presentation.
The availability of VirtualBox (which is definately not what you would use on a big server) or NetBeans IDE backs up my theory of an Oracle internal usage as OS for development workstations.

the concept that a company ships an OS with some tools in there, just because that's what we use internally seems at least doubtful to me.. I would not adopt that strategy. and especially, I would not silently adopt it, by just having those programs be there without pushing the platform as a viable development system. if Oracle does indeed have some promotional strategy for "Solaris: the super-duper-server-OS, now with new UI and tools for immediate developer productivity" then, fine, this is their goal, to promote Solaris as a scalable platform that can range from individual developer up to corporate datacenter.
maybe, they simply expect to have low-end machines act as dumb terminals and VNC into the Solaris server to run NetBeans out of there (more common that one would expect, in one of my previous positions I had this RHEL server with IBM Rational Rhapsody on it, and everyone in the team would connect there to run RR instead of having a copy on each member's computer)

albeit being slightly OT, I would add that said Rational Rhapsody arrangement tended to be extremely cumbersome because for some reason IBM had decided to basically port Windows UI components to Linux and have the tool look-and-feel like a Windows program on a Linux box to which we were remotely connecting using Macintosh computers...

Solaris from SUN was a painful experience, at least for me. After they shut down the OpenSolaris project, they kind of lost momentum. I don't know what happened to Belenix and Illuminos, but they seemed to have disappeared from the radar. Sticking to Linux sounds like a good idea to me..

OpenIndiana is still continuing:
http://openindiana.org/

their source code repositories:
https://hg.openindiana.org/?sort=lastchange