Thanks, that's helpful! I'm mainly experienced with Debian, but I've been exploring whether Debian-for-everything is still the best policy. In terms of actually trying anything else, I've only been doing some test setups of FreeBSD so far, but "something Illumos" has been on my radar as well and I've been trying to understand the landscape there, along with playing a little bit (not very seriously, I'll admit) on a SmartOS instance through Joyent's cloud.

Technically it seems quite impressive, and Illumos being more or less the ZFS upstream is appealing. The distribution situation has been more confusing, though. OpenIndiana seemed to have a community, which is why I was first looking into that option, but it does indeed not seem to be very active. That's one attraction of FreeBSD & Debian, that they're community supported, and I can with fairly high confidence expect they'll be around in 5 or 10 years supporting the distribution. It's less clear to me how to wade into Illumos in a way that mitigates risk of the upstream going away. I think Illumos itself fits that description, with a community that will be around, but does any individual distribution? There are clearly resources behind OmniOS and SmartOS, which gives some confidence, but they are also quite heavily concentrated resources (one company drives each, and it's not impossible that they could change focus and deemphasize development of the public distribution).