AIX really wasn't all that bad back when I was using it. It's very unlike HP-UX/*BSD/Solaris/Linux (sometimes annoyingly so), but it's generally rock-solid and very, very easy to manage.
Unlike what someone else wrote, it was IIRC always possible to do anything SMIT did via the command line, but frankly SMIT was often easier & faster than doing it by hand.
One of AIX's problems is that it didn't IMHO age well. It was designed for a different world than the one in which we live in now, and one thing it didn't feel that it was designed to do was evolve.
Would I recommend AIX for any project in the future? Hell no, because it would mean inviting IBM into the project, and that is second only to inviting Oracle into a project on the list of gross management errors. But it wasn't bad software for its time, and I don't think it deserves to be hated.
Not only was it possible to do everything in SMIT (or smitty) on the command line, smit would tell you the exact command line and options that it was running for any given operation, making it very easy to script and learn.
Unlike what someone else wrote, it was IIRC always possible to do anything SMIT did via the command line, but frankly SMIT was often easier & faster than doing it by hand.
One of AIX's problems is that it didn't IMHO age well. It was designed for a different world than the one in which we live in now, and one thing it didn't feel that it was designed to do was evolve.
Would I recommend AIX for any project in the future? Hell no, because it would mean inviting IBM into the project, and that is second only to inviting Oracle into a project on the list of gross management errors. But it wasn't bad software for its time, and I don't think it deserves to be hated.