We had the Sun workstations in college (some with that crazy laser mouse) and I think towards the end of my tenure, most of the labs were switching to linux boxes, but at that same time Solaris x86 actually came out - so on commodity hardware you could run Solaris which was kinda fun.

I did this a little, but the things you could do with actual Linux started to get interesting for me at that time - building routers for our shared home network, hosting Quake servers, doing actual programming with gcc etc and the hardware support was a bit better as I recall.

I also interviewed at Sun in Boston - I think the small group servers group or something - I really liked the engineers I met there and I did consider working there for a minute, but ended up in Silicon Valley which I think was better fit for me.