Following the availability of Solaris 11.4 Beta I decided to give it a try.
I do not even intend a very first review, perhaps just some very preliminary impressions.
The installation hasn't changed that much, except there's no live GUI option anymore, which isn't an issue anyway. The removed option was indeed more suitable to promote the system in the past, but that's not needed anymore. On the other hand, it seems that duration of the internal operations of the install process have become longer, not that much, but enough to notice.
Once installed I do have noticed that (at least this beta version) take considerably (perhaps almost twice) more time to come up online (on an idle system). I hope that this is indeed related to a lot of development hooks and assertions still present on this beta release. The shutdown on the other hand seems to be OK taking around 30 seconds (on an idle system).
Interestingly, the packages repository still points to the current public release of Solaris 11.3 GA and I think that this may cause undesired issues if not promptly avoided by installing a local Solaris 11.4 Beta repository which is a very very long download and install.
The system certainly needs more than the bare minimum of 4GB of RAM and more CPUs according to the intended workloads. But in general (even idle) it also seems to be very I/O bound and with this I would mean it should use SSDs for mostly everything. Trying otherwise will probably required too much patience for the impatient.
Once this initial hurdles are overcome and the system settles down it seams OK.
But, of course, one has to go on experimenting to get more first impressions.
In particular, I started by check the progress on GNU packages.
