My experience with AIX as a sysadmin ca 2005 was dramatically different.
Things "worked", but everything was OLD. CLI tools had bugs and warts that GNU figured out decades previously.
I remember having to use obnoxious workarounds when tooling broke because 'find' wouldn't even work properly once you exceeded a certain number of files. (Several thousand, IIRC)
And that curses-based wrapper for doing administration tasks... glad I forgot the name of it, to be honest.
Getting Bash and the other GNU tools to run on AIX 3.2.5 was definitely a chore but I still miss those days.
The culture was a lot more active in the 90's. I mean if you were trying to port something to AIX and having trouble with gcc, you could go on comp.unix.aix and IBM employees would actually respond and be helpful.
Things "worked", but everything was OLD. CLI tools had bugs and warts that GNU figured out decades previously.
I remember having to use obnoxious workarounds when tooling broke because 'find' wouldn't even work properly once you exceeded a certain number of files. (Several thousand, IIRC)
And that curses-based wrapper for doing administration tasks... glad I forgot the name of it, to be honest.