Yeah, I don't wanna drag this out in this thread since it's been hashed out many times, but these are the types of concerns that make illumos appealing to me.

Yeah, I don't wanna drag this out in this thread since it's been hashed out many times, but these are the types of concerns that make illumos appealing to me. You get a system that has been developed and thoroughly tested as a single cohesive whole. It has advanced features that you know work well out of the box, which require a lot of fiddling and custom hackery to replicate reliably on Linux. Anyone who has tried to get LXC working well on Linux will instantly appreciate the ease of firing up a zone in SmartOS; all that crap you fought for hours to make work on LXC works automatically, it works well, and it doesn't hide its guts from you. I appreciate how the system coheres and operates together in a sensible, straightforward manner, that I trust to work without crashing or getting in my face or breaking between incremental updates. You can't say that about Linux containerization. You install Docker and then overlayfs is a broken piece of crap. You update your overlay driver, and it's still a broken piece of crap. You try to work and hack around it, and you eventually find something that mostly-works, but it's disgusting and terrible, like having to do eight different commands as a single RUN line with continuations (just had to do this today; saved 200MB on my Docker image). illumos looks like a potential modern refuge from this, where I can still run Linux containers thanks to LX zones, and where I can still keep the monkeys happy by giving them a Kubernetes and they're none-the-wiser that it's running on something that isn't going to be crapping itself every time I blink. Crossbow is impressive, as you say. There are a lot of gems and features that are only half-implemented on Linux and a total nightmare to get working, that work out of the box on illumos. At least on paper. I have a SmartOS VM that I'm playing with. Tried to grab an image from Docker Hub. imgadm doesn't support Docker v2 images. There's a pull request that's been open since September with the changes and no information about it in Gerrit. Tried to poke the Joyent employees who participated in this PR for an update and up to this point, radio silence. Not a very inspiring start. It would've been a godsend to confidently and quickly be able to pull images from Docker repos and deploy them on SmartOS. Seems, however, that they want this to be hard if you don't use Triton, because they want you to buy Triton (yes, I know this is open-source; the setup demands at least a couple of machines, the "cloud on a laptop" is a VMWare image that spawns multiple components (a la minikube) and I don't want to try to run one of those right now, and I want it to work on plain SmartOS!). Lots of promise, but sadly, not certain that it's firm footing right now.