Are any of you using an operating system other than a Win/Mac/Linux? What are you using it for, a server or perhaps a daily driver?
The Openindiana distro which uses the opensource fork of Solaris, Illumos looks very interesting, I'm curious if any of you have particular experience in that or other SysV type system.
Illumos sounds interesting, but unfortunately it fucking sucks. At least, OpenIndiana does. All there is to be said about it is that the slowlaris meme is real.
I have no knowledge of its performance characteristics, but the feature set looks sexy.
No, ex sun devs have talked about this, people would compile their binaries for sun in debug mode and then magically expect sun to be faster.
It sucks for a desktop, even though it technically supports intel graphics I was getting no acceleration and screen tearing out the wingwong.
People have used illumnos distros to in the server room, I hosted a few websites off some joyent zones, never had a problem big enough to learn DTrace but I really should.
I've tried OpenSolaris in various incarnations since before the Oracle acquisition. After the acquisition, Oracle decided to kill OpenSolaris, which means they stopped providing code drops under the CDDL for all of the technologies that made OpenSolaris interesting (like ZFS), not to mention the kernel and other OS components. So ZFS has continued to be developed behind closed doors with all kinds of neat features (like transparent encryption), while the open ZFS effort has kinda stagnated.
I tried OpenIndiana again about 8 months ago, using it as my daily driver for a few weeks, and I really don't want to knock it. Considering how small the community is that has taken the CDDL OpenSolaris code and run with it under the Illumos/OpenIndiana projects, they're really doing an amazing job. They've continued to develop the technologies, port software, and they had finally gotten the whole codebase to compile under GCC instead of Sun's compilers, with the exception of (I think) a few utilities. But, in spite of their talent and hard work, it is a small community, with all of the manpower problems that entails.
In the end, OpenIndiana wasn't different enough in some ways from Linux or the BSDs to be really compelling (yup, it's another Unix-descendent/Unix-like), and was different enough in other ways (I couldn't figure out how to harden it and encrypt my drives as I'm accustomed to on Linux and FreeBSD) that I wound up switching away again. Also, while I'm sure that ZFS and DTrace and all of those fun technologies are well-documented, in a fashion, I've never found user-friendly documentation that I was able to use to get up and running with them. Because of the small size of the community, I was concerned about security, and bugs do seem to get fixed at a pretty slow rate.
If you want to get into OS development, I'd definitely check it out. They could use the help, they seem pretty friendly, and it could be a neat opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond. I mean, thousands of people contribute to the Linux kernel. Big fuckin' deal. But there are few enough people working on Illumos/OpenIndiana that you could get some badass hacker cred if you made a significant contribution.
Oh, and this is from a desktop/development platform perspective, of course. As user mentioned, if you're interested in it as a server platform, that's a whole different thing, and it may be just what you want.
Illumos is a great server OS along side the BSD's. Zones are a better version of Jails, and Dtrace is amazing.
I'd recommend SmartOS though if you'd plan on using it. Having a Linux Emulation layer is useful for some applications, but you can use Openindiana or OmniOS and just use Zones running FreeBSD or something.
Illumos is a 7/10 OS, Lagging behind the BSD's a bit due to obscurity due to lack of use. Though the more people using it, the better.
What are you talking about? The core ZFS, DTrace and OS team left Oracle and continued to work on their open versions, OpenZFS is considered superior and has all the original devs working on the code.
The way CDDL works is that if Oracle wants these improvements they will have to reopen ZFS, it's pretty amusing really.
PonyOS master race!
OpenBSD, for everything since around 2004.
That's funny since ZFS only worked (properly) for me on Solaris.