Solaris

Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 17 threads.

People raised many different problems with Solaris, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 20 complaints

Solaris desktop looked dated and felt worse to use than Linux's2026-09-23
Backspace key echoes ^H on the Sun console, so the keyboard looks misconfigured out of the box2026-09-21
Documentation is confusing and lacks section 2 man pages for door calls2024-07-24
Commands behave inconsistently across Unixes, making portable scripts harder to write2022-10-30
Changing the hostname required reinstalling the OS, and the unofficial workaround was involved2022-10-29
Late-90s Solaris usability judged far worse than Windows 3.x and NT 42022-04-09
Shell commands and their usage syntax differed from what users expected, so people had to relearn them2019-10-16
Solaris default userland felt frustrating, so admins swapped in GNU tools2019-06-07
Earlier Solaris secure enclave feature was bureaucratic and unusable in practice2018-12-07
Functions hidden behind extra mouse buttons are hard for new users to find2018-10-23
Default install's standard tools are miserable, requiring GNU tools to be installed first2017-09-06
Felt user hostile compared to other Unix systems, making it harder to work with2017-09-05
Hostname now stored in opaque SMF tree set via long impenetrable command2016-08-18
Zones are hard to manage; small single-purpose zones need 4G of software and patching is difficult2016-01-08
Zones are hard to use; running minimal isolated containers was impractical2016-01-08
Zones were hard to patch; sparse versus full zone choice was unworkable for the commenter2015-08-28
Firewall was so over-engineered that almost nobody could understand or install it2013-01-22
Compiling anything for it, especially GUI software, is a pain2010-07-18
Package management tools are stupidly bad, and old UNIX utilities are awkward to use2009-01-21
In-place upgrades can nearly wreck the machine, requiring heavy recovery effort2009-01-21