It's already great: SmartOS is the best one can get when it comes to running a cloud, public or private, and if that cloud must, without compromise, function co

It's already great: SmartOS is the best one can get when it comes to running a cloud, public or private, and if that cloud must, without compromise, function correctly in the face of even the most severe failures, hardware or software wise. Zones + ZFS + fault management architecture (fmadm(1M) / svcadm(1M)) make it possible. Have a piece of software which must run on GNU/Linux? No problem, it'll happily run inside of an lx-branded zone with zero performance penalty, where both it (/usr) and the illumos native commands will be available (/native), so one can keep one's cake and eat it, too. Otherwise - there are 14,000 packages ready to run, something Solaris never, ever had. It's not a desktop operating system, it doesn't have that kind of a mass adoption. But on the other hand, when one considers just how Windows-like GNU/Linux became (systemd), it's better that it doesn't: it does one thing and does it well, and that's powering the high performance, massive clouds. For desktop, there's macOS, and that's fine.