or to MNX Triton or vanilla SmartOS, they're the greatest.
I'm sure that SmartOS is great, but being based on Illumos, I'd be hesitant to switch. Illumos doesn't have the most expansive community or hardware support as far as I know.
By doing on-prem private installation of it [0]. Support contract is not necessary. We run illumos on HPe hardware from Gen6 to Gen10 and there are no issues. Even have GPU compute going via passthrough to ubuntu bhyve HVM.
I remember taking a quick hobbyist look at JoyentOS or something like that about five years ago, but I thought the project died... I'm shocked to hear it's still alive.