The ZFS thing still bums me out to this day, but I think I got over the demise of Solaris when OpenSolaris fizzled out.
My vague memories of it are that the userland showed signs of legacy (/usr/ucb), and I could never get the tools I needed installed. But that was a consequence of the setting I was working in, not Solaris.
It would be particularly interesting to hear from fans of STREAMS or other kernel features.
I personally don't give a shit about Java or MySQL, so I wouldn't have been sad if those products died, but I know lots of people who would be.
For me, it was ZFS that I was really excited about. Back then, I thought I might have ZFS (or some ZFS-derived or -inspired equivalent bitrot-resistant checksumming filesystem) on all my computers and phones by, say, 2017.
But I don't. My Linux box can finally have ZFS (with some caveats), but my Macs and phones can't and won't; it was another sad day (for me) when we learned Apple's "modern" new filesystem, APFS, does not do checksumming for user data[1][2].
Either way, I've always had a soft spot for Solaris, and think they're on of the best examples of enterprises being able to produce quality software. It's incredibly sad to see this happen to the Sun legacy, and it makes me wonder why Oracle acquired Sun in the first place.
So if it wasn't for Oracle, maybe Sun's heritage would already have been lost much sooner.
Not that it excuses what happened afterwards, this is just the typical Fortune 500 attitude that only cares about Excel sheet reports.
Java and MySQL were probably important reasons.
