Now that Sun has released it's Solaris 10 OS under its own open source license, I guess we can talk about it in this forum. You can get Solaris 10 here. But really, even though Sun is criticized for this or that by opensource purists, if you stop and think, OpenOffice.org is what made the Linux desktop thinkable. No OpenOffice.org, no linux desktop commercially. End of story. I think critics should look elsewhere if they want something to attack, not one of the major contributors to the open source movement :: check out the new OpenOffice.org 2 by the way, it's pretty slick, still beta as of this posting, but should be out full version soon.

There's an interesting review of the new Solaris i86 OS, comparisons between it and Redhat, both in 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

Unfortunately, it doesn't include a comparison between Windows 2003 server, that would have been very interesting, to put it mildly, there is another test here but it's not using the same hardware. But even given the relatively slower hardware used, only a 4 way setup using Windows 2003 got even remotely close to a two way 32 bit setup with redhat or solaris, and it's not that close, tested were ip connections open, ip connections made per second, and transactions. Small wonder that MS has so much problem getting their monopoly into the web serving world. When you compare the 64 bit dual processor numbers the differences become fairly staggering.

By the way, you can see those same differences anytime you want, just set up a linux box, make it do some very complex, full processor calculation, then try the same thing on a windows box, you'll immediately note the massive difference in processing efficiency. That's why they made Shrek on Linux, by the way, it wasn't ideological, unix systems just are better at hardcore crunching. One day MS will deliver what is essentially just an MS branded unix, with a window's shell on it, but they won't admit that they did it.
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