The differences
First, a bit of history.
Solaris (sort-of-previously SunOS) was released in the early nineties by Sun Microsystems, and was initially designed to work on the also-Sun SPARC line of processors, though it quickly got expanded to support x86 processors too.
For a while, Sun (and its purple behemoths in server racks everywhere) were well regarded and a fairly common sight in data centers. The company went from strength to strength, developing things such as Solaris Zones (like FreeBSD jails, as we discussed previously), ZFS, and Java.
Not really a home-user system, Solaris was popular alongside SPARC processors in enterprise environments, though as Linux gained traction and market mind-share, this and other alternative OSes, ...
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