I've been running smartos at least since 2015 where I co-located my server. There have been times where I felt like giving up, but people like danmcd, jperkin and others always stepped in and fixed what needed to be fixed for LX to be usable and working. (Keeping java updated and running is hard, uphill battle. Thanks!) I always ran a mixture of OS and LX zones and bcantrill's t-shirt with "Save the whales, kill your VM" made sense. I've used zones in Solaris 10 even before and they just click with me. FreeBSD's jails are nice, but far from it. And linux's cgroups are a joke. And using KVM/VMs for security containerization is just insane. At dayjob, I've implemented multiple proxmox clusters, because we're linux shop and there's no way to "sell" smartos or tritonDC to die-hard debian colleagues, but I've managed to sell them ZFS. With personal stuff, I like my systems to take care of themselves without constant babysitting and SmartOS or OpenBSD provide just that. I don't dislike windows, I love UNIX. You could really feel those extra 20y UNIX had compared to linux. I migrated all my stuff to proxmox for like 2 months. And then went back to SmartOS, because there was something missing ... probably elegance, sanity, simplicity or even something you'd call "hack value".

the nice thing about the Proxmox + ZFS setup is that it works and is even recommended without using hardware raid controllers. Less headaches either way.

I recently wrote a guide [1] how to use proxmox with ZFS over iSCSI so you can use the snapshot features from a SAN

[1] https://blog.haschek.at/2023/zfs-over-iscsi-in-proxmox.html

I feel the same. I used a SmartOS distro called Danube Cloud for a long time and am looking to move and looked at Harvester[1] and OpenNebula, but with everything I know about Kubernetes(and LongHorn) I'm reluctant to use something so heavily based on Kubernetes.

At its peak I reached out multiple times to Joyent to fix their EFI support for virtualization. The Danube team had similar experiences with them, working on live migrations for VMs, and a few months back I did a rebase of the platform image to a more recent illumos stack.

Two of the fundamental issues with Illumos is that they don't seem to understand that they need to fix the horrendous platform build to get community support to keep up with the pace of development of other OS's. The platform build is a huge nasty mess of custom shell scripts, file based status snapshots, which includes the entire userspace in the kernel build. Basically if your openssl version is out of wack the entire thing will fail. Not because it has to, but because it was never adapted to modern needs of someone just wanting to hack on a kernel. It's fixable, but I don't see any desire to fix it, and even if that desire eventually shows up it might just be too little, too late.

[1] https://harvesterhci.io/