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I have been looking more at smartos (and other openindiana derivatives). Zones + KVM + ZFS. Oh my!

You forgot DTrace!

ack! I sure did!

And you are quite right. DTrace is super.

smartos does seem to be missing an X server you can run in the global zone on the physical machine's physical video port(s), though, which makes it pretty useless for a home computer (which otherwise would be a great place to start playing with it before deploying it elsewhere).

SmartOS is definitely not intended to be used as a desktop system, but it can work great as a home server if you have some spare hardware.

OpenIndiana is another Illumos distro that can be used as a desktop. You get all of the core benefits of Illumos (zones, zfs, dtrace). The big downside is that you don't get the nice tools for managing zones/vms that SmartOS provides (vmadm/imgadm).

FreeBSD has ported a lot of the best features from Illumos so it could also work for you.

Just remember that an OS is only worth running if it has DTrace.

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