SmartOS appreciation thread

Where's the Illumos love on Holla Forums? All I ever see on here is gahnoo/loonix this and shitty-meme-language that. I just got the onion infrastructure set up to host my own sandboxed darknet blog across multiple zones to sandbox, and SmartOS makes it easy as heck to do it! With ZFS, backups are a breeze, with DTrace I'll be able to hunt any bug in my web server, and with Zones I have close to an iron clad guarantee no CIAnigger will be surfing my local LAN from this thing. I plan on dropping a few tripwires into this thing that would rip the zones offline but I won't detail those. :^)

What's your experience being part of the Illumos masterrace?
BSD plebs welcome, Loonix jesters too, Wangblow$ and crApple fags get out REEEEEEEE!

It's UNIX-like, so it should be called StupidOS or DumbOS.

How could you say no to such a redpilled OS?

It's a fucking cianigger botnet. Get out.

all bloat

What you talking about nigger? Systemd is far more bloat than the whole damn OS!

SmartOS, while usable on its own, is the operating system component to SDC, or the "Smart Data Center." SDC is an open sourced cloud suite. Literally, you'd 'install' boot off flash/CDROM media, then configure the Head Node, and then boot the rest of the nodes with PXE from the Head. SDC basically lets you set up your own private Joyent cloud. While SmartOS alone only needs a minimum of a GB RAM for comfy operation, SDC needs some 64GB RAM for the Head Node due to various server zones which run on it.

SmartOS is a descendant of OpenSolaris. It is meant to be a hypervisor running three kinds of zones: a regular "Joyent brand" zone which is just Solaris, an "LX-brand" zone which is binary compatible to the Linux kernel meaning: native Linux-compiled software on SmartOS, and KVM zones.

So it's not really a personal OS then?

It can be. Boot it on a shitbox and you have one-box/many-separate-services without the fat-ass VM overhead and with better sandbox security than jails or chroot. I have not tried starting X on it, but if your ideal OS is something to be installed and persistent rather than live-booted there's OpenIndiana and Tribblix, OmniOSce, etc.
You don't need SDC to use SmartOS. SDC was open sourced by Joyent much later than SmartOS' arrival, which is why the separation between the two exists (but won't in the distant future, as they're merging the two).
All you need for SmartOS is to burn it to disc or flash it to thumbdrive, boot, do initial config (which sets in the global zone: IP information, root password, zpool setup, and done). Next reboot goes to login console. You don't need the disc/stick in the system anymore at that point and can remove it.
Upgrade is a breeze: put new image on stick/disc and reboot the system running the deprecated version. That's it.
SmartOS is designed on the concept that 'data' should have location and 'software,' typically much smaller than 'data,' should come to meet 'data' on-location to do work. So, customer zones with their software stacks reside on hard drives at the location of where the data will be processed while the OS in a datacenter is PXE-delivered to that location. SmartOS is not about network-attached storage (though that can be set up).
I can't make much claim for SDC though because I don't have the hardware to run it. Also, I mistyped and put 64GB RAM required for SDC where it should have been 16GB RAM.
I don't have that much experience with setting up datacenters personally maybe in my future, but SDC seems stupid easy for a handful of techs to provision a datacenter with hundreds (or thousands) of nodes with this in a day or much likely less.

Let me tell you, many of the 'new features' the FOSS GNU/Linux ecosystem has been implementing in the last decade or so are copies of Solaris features from more than a decade ago. Those innovations being:
smf yum -> systemd yuck
zfs yum -> btrfs yuck
dtrace yum -> systemtap yuck
Solaris crew even took and improved some ideas:
jails yuck -> zones yum
NIH-syndrome has interfered with integrating these open-sourced techs. Additionally it seems the GPL is literally walling off these known good solutions, creating a vacuum for inferior substitutes like systemd and btrfs to crop up. GNU/Linux: Reinventing the wheel, but more poorly and with faster moving interfaces (except the kernel/userland interface, Linus has been good in that regard).

Did I mention SmartOS and SDC do Docker? With zones, it solves the Docker security problems.

reskinned solaris?
no thanks.

Technically it's Illumos now, since Oracle owns the non-OpenSolaris branch named Solaris.
Also it's not merely 'reskinned,' there's a lot of polish by Joyent which went into it. Joyent is a big contributor of code upstream to OpenIndiana and illumos-gate.
Don't knock it unless you've given it a college try. You'll need either a compatible shitbox or VMWare Workstation/Fusion (as vbox and qemu run it like dogshit).

How easy is it to install, what level of experience does the user need to install maintain and run it. How good is the hardware compatibility and support. Does it have good clear documentations if shit breaks. Does it respect the users privacy, security and their command. Can it be run as a desktop OS, if not fine but don't whine about not getting desktop love, if the OS can not be adapted to one. What kind of software does it have for users. Does it have an office suite, gaymes, creative programs 3D 2D video music editing ,what browsers does it support.

If an OS can not or does not want to answer those things in a satisfactory way, it doesn't deserve love. Puppies and babies deserve love. An OS needs to prove it's worth to users if it wants love, users don't give a fuck how perfect an OS is, if it doesn't run on their machine, if it doesn't have software, or support. And as fun as shit talking about other OS to make itself look better in comparison, that only goes so far when users are looking to get their stuff to work. Can the OS provide a better solution than the competition. If not, stop whining about how much your pet OS deserves love.

No harder than Linux, depends on the Illumos equivalent of 'distro'.
About what it takes to manage CentOS. It's not Ubuntu, but it's not Gentoo either in 'difficulty.' The paradigms differ a bit (/dev population, network management commands, non-GNU userland utilities having different switches than GNU ones, etc).
This one is the rawest part of the deal. You will be selecting hardware from the Illumos HCL, unless you're bored and porting NetBSD drivers to Illumos sounds like a fun game to pass time with. If this is an argument to not bother, then try to imagine Linux hardware compatibility 15 years ago at the height of the Windows desktop. You can't knock the OS on that unless it's GNU/Hurd-tier in compatibility.
Man pages are like OpenBSD's: very good. Website/wiki tags along at a bit of a distance though. There's #illumos,#openindiana,#smartos on Freenode and you'll get an answer, within 10 minutes most times of the day, for anything you can't find on the site or in man pages.
Absolutely. Illumos comes with everything OpenSolaris had, including mandatory access control. All the code is open for inspection and compilation. There are no telemetry services within SmartOS, other than the ones you enable for monitoring in your own cloud environment with SDC. There's nothing like the shit Ubuntu pulled. You have full power on this OS. It is, after all, UNIX.
I have not tried to start X on SmartOS, but yes OpenIndiana is a desktop OS. I believe Tribblix and OmniOSce both can run X and do desktop environments. At that point and higher, it's pretty much the same as GNU/Linux.
Almost everything GNU/Linux has. OpenIndiana comes with IPS (which isn't that great), SmartOS comes with pkgsrc, and while I haven't tried it I'm sure Gentoo Prefix will bootstrap in a normal Zone and if not then an LX-branded one. SmartOS also comes with Ubuntu and CentOS images for your LX-branded zones, so you'll be running Ubuntu or CentOS userland in a zone on top of Illumos kernel (which is giving the zone a Linux-compatible interface). I'm pretty sure SmartOS will run X, but if not I know the other 'distros' will.
Again, check and buy from the HCL. I believe nVidia has the best support.

In many use cases, yes. It's mainly a problem of lack of minds knowing it exists, and secondarily hardware. While your typical gaymer isn't going to like this OS, someone who is paranoid and wants to say run a darknet website should be deeply interested. I think anyone wanting to set up a cloud solution should take notice too. It's not going to run on your beaglebone, it's not going to run on your 20 year old Pentium II laptop. Again, if your prime argument that an OS is shit is because of hardware compatibility, you should uninstall GNU/Linux right now for being a hypocrite. You'd have smothered it in its crib in the early 2000's with that kind of thinking.

Wrong, I'm pointing out the OS you are touting may have a chicken and egg problem with hardware support at this stage, if you want more users to even notice the OS. You recognized and pointed it out yourself.
Even loonix is still having some problems with hardware and driver support, and with things like secureboot, or MS getting their pajeet microdick hard at the thought of hardware lock in via making OEMs an offer they can't refuse. If you are getting defensive about it already and telling me I should uninstall gahnoo lunix, you're not doing your touted OS any favor. It's a rough market out there, and if you think I'm a meanie now. The OS you're touting will have a much rougher time if you want it getting noticed outside of this board.
Then at least that part should be more clearly touted if you want the OS to be noticed by the intended users and needs. Trumpet the shit out of that, how if a user is interested in setting up the dankest website give the OS a try, don't be shy about saying it is a more specialized OS for a more specialized use, that requires a hardware compatibility list and x amount of hardware power level. Power users are no strangers to something like that. Saying it's not for gaymes is fine. Apple for all their warts managed to turn that into something macfags are proud to say for some reason. Though I suggest not going further than that. "Gaymes are for babbies" type of complaining from some segments of Holla Forums is unproductive sourgraping imo.

Aight then. I have a secondary HDD that is currently unplugged that I have to backup some data from, but once that's done I might give it a spin on bare metal some time.

tl;dr
Look bro friend buddy guy. I want a marketplace where there are multitudes of OS that users can choose from, other than just MS Apple or now Google. Because we're all fucked if those 3 becomes the only choices. I want user's privacy and security to be respected more than ever. Yet you know the situation today, more users are willing to trade their rights away if they are offered good convenience and usability. We can REEEEEE all day about how people should not fall for that Faustian bargain. But it's the reality. If the OS you are touting can offer better solutions, then great. But instead of asking for love, at this stage I suggest getting the OS stronger. Because if it does have strong potential, it will gain a target on it's head from things like GoogleAlphabet and MS (Apple might be too busy fucking around with getting their phones thinner in their UFO office). And those fuckers are far more meaner than some rando on a vietnamese radio play forum.

Got'cha. I'm hyperbolic by nature i.e. I have to work to not be hyperbolic. I meant this thread to be a fan thread and not an advertising thread, but the Q&A seems to have gone in that direction. I couldn't sell ice in the Sahara or blankets to Eskimos if my life depended on it.

It's cool bro. Just skimming some general info so far, when I get around to giving it a spin on my test machine it will likely be OpenIndiana, since that seems to fit best for my own criteria, test machine specs and usage pattern (64bit cpu 8gigs ram, non server, desktop use).

I used solaris at school on sunrays. They looked cool, but barely could run ff properly.

I want to love this system, but isn't it going to end up in the trash heap when Oracle dump Solaris?

That's a shame, VMWare seems to have gone the route of firing their American workers and outsourcing to China. Hopefully vbox is good enough for my experiments.

No, because Oracle already dumped Illumos' 'upstream' aka OpenSolaris when Oracle took it back to closed source again years ago. Illumos has been developing on its own. Now that Oracle has dumped Solaris, it will free up some engineers to work on Illumos for downstream companies using it in their datacenters.

Let's be straight here, FF was going to shit when it went from -bird to -fox in name.

Just pirate Workstation 12. Who fucking pays for software anymore except in the case of being a multi-{m,b}illion dollar company, they can afford to pay for software?!!

VBox runs it like dogshit, but it'll run. VBox runs almost everything like dogshit. This dichotomy exists between LibreOffice and MS Office too: try loading a half-million+ line/row data file in Calc vs Excel, and do some things like charting and analysis. LibO doesn't compete. Open Source/FOSS is great, but unfortunately since people don't pay for the software only a select few autists have limited hobby time to go through code like that and optimize it. Otherwise it's mostly clever normgroids with their shiny new CS degree from Java University reinventing the wheel every month to fix the previous month's minor flat tire.

Not everyone is a poorfag. It's true I rarely do buy software, but if it's decent and useful then of course I'm going to support the creators.