From an end users point of view, What is Solaris.
 

What is solaris to you,
What makes you use it and what are the benifets of using it.
What is its major Con and what is its biggest Pro,
Does this pro outweigh the con or vice-versa.

Also, from an End (home) user point of view, who could make use of Solaris,
If i just came from Windows or Linux/BSD would i feel comfotable with Solaris, or would i be shocked and quickly uninstall anything else i have because i have just found-me-here some gold.

What are your thoughts?

I would like to know.

x86 solaris has a nickname. slowaris. that's a good hint.
at least it comes with gnome now, and not just cde.

Talking about "slowaris" without arguments or explanations is unfair.

Solaris x86 goal hasn't been to compete on the pure performance level with linux or BSD, but to provide the same set of enterprise graded functionalities that paying customers are willing to ... pay for, and that are either missing or less mature on the linux/bsd side (clustering, resource management, live upgrade, security, containers, volume management, QoS, fs snapshots, flash install, instrumentation, RBAC, PAM, ACL, Direct I/O, NCA, multi threading, processor sets, trunking, Java, ...), or simply impossible to achieve on BSD without a major kernel re-architecturing (SMP).

For the average user, interested in a desktop or small server use, some of there features are/seems irrelevant or do not apply.

Sun is working to have Solaris x86 performance to be on par with linux on its next version, SunOS 5.10, a beta of which being freely downloadable (Solaris Express).

Concerning the CDE/gnome etc point, one shouldn't confuse the core operating system, and applications running on it, the graphic environment being in the middle.

Sure most linux distributions are bundling gnome, kde or other graphic environment.

I just want to point out that, ironically, this multiplicity of sometimes diverging and incompatible environment is exactly what nearly killed Unix in the early nineties and forced the leading unix vendors to create the CDE standard.

CDE, based on licensed software, has evolved so slowly that today it is clearly behind most of the open source window managers/environments in term of useability, but there is no incompatibility between the latters and solaris, and most (all?) of them are available either on the Solaris companion freeware CD, or on sites like sunfreeware.com or blastwave.org.

There is however one area where Solaris is behind Linux or BSD, the H/W supported is much limited. While there is no problem with graphics cards, less peripherals, and specially network cards are recognized, and it is difficult to find drivers, and unfortunately reusing linux drivers (or portions of driver's code) is not an option because of GPL issues.

For the application side, linux binaries not depending on linux specific stuff can already run unmodified on Solaris, by using lxrun.

Re: From an end users point of view, What is Solaris.
 

i wasn't trying to upset a solaris salesman.
i just saw a post that said, "What is solaris to you?"
i saw the quest for its major con.
and, stuff about a linux/bsd user being comfortable or uncomfortable.

i played with solaris and it felt really sluggish. i ran some benchmarks
for myself that i'm not going to share. Then i saw solaris for x86
called slowaris all over the web, and realized i wasn't the only one.

that was solaris to me, and what i felt its biggest con was.

as far as user comfort, just having cde, (when i tried it), made
me a little uncomfortable. and i just cut that down to, they
have gnome now, so i would have a choice.

i love operating systems, except for MS ones. well, i liked win 3.11
and i hope solaris continues to exist and i don't want to
discourage anyone from using it that wants to.

Don't bother with solaris x86, you'd have better luck trying to install Linux on an ARM-based Coffee Machine.
I don't think Solaris would do much for you if you're a home user, after all, Solaris is UNIX(tm).
If you want to try something which is very fast, clean and portable and probably suited for x86, go straight for NetBSD, it has Linux emulation, as well as Solaris (I'm very sure about this one) emulation and many more, too..
But this is the Solaris forum. Bottom line is, if you're willing to stop using your hardware to its full extent as you would with Linux or Windows, then go for Solaris, but I'll just warn you that you will probably regret it unless you have a SPARC.

I think jlliagre's comments are correct.
Solaris is not really aimed at home users, or even x86 until recently.
The CDE desktop has a Windows 3.1 feel to me.
While generally similar to Linux, there are quite a few differences in tools and commands. Nothing unsurmountable if you are aware of this.
A Solaris home install would be more suited to someone already using Solaris in another environment that either wants or needs to use it at home, as well as people that enjoy trying different flavors of *nix. In other words, not a first choice as a home desktop, though it can possibly work fine.
whansard is correct that it is no speed demon. I do not consider it terrible, but I only toy with my Solaris install.

The real thing (Unix SVR4).

I don't sell it, although I'm selling my skills.
I'm using it for C, ksh, Java, JSP and WEB (portal) development.
The very same products my customers use are installed on it (Java Enterprise System Stack).
I'm running in on my laptop too, this saves me an invaluable time as I don't need to be on my customers site to test/develop/run things.

major con: less h/w support than linux, for example, I've not been able yet to have my laptop WiFi interface to work.

biggest pro: all the features I mentioned in my previous message and the ones that are coming, specially the solaris 10 zones and dtrace.

clearly

You probably would be very disappointed if you just install the base distribution, but if you add say firefox, thunderbird, openoffice.org, some packages from blastwave.org (gimp, xpdf, ethereal, mgdiff, pdadrv, pilotlink, cvs, cdrtools, xcdroast...) and the other applications you expect for your desktop machine, I guess you'll feel much more comfortable.
In fact, I'm pretty sure an end user won't notice the difference from a Linux system, except probably on the gaming area. The administrative tasks are also slightly different.

Well, you didn't tell us what kind of use you expect from your desktop.