"I can't see ever switching to SmartOS unless it had a vibrant packaging community" SmartOS has close to 15,000 packages and growing[1], because it uses NetBSD

"I can't see ever switching to SmartOS unless it had a vibrant packaging community" SmartOS has close to 15,000 packages and growing[1], because it uses NetBSD's pkgsrc, which is also used by FreeBSD. Since the Joyent engineer responsible for this is also a pkgsrc developer, pkgsrc now has full upstream support for illumos / Solaris based operating systems. It also means that SmartOS has full access to FreeBSD's software library, which is a wealth of software: unless it's Linux kernel specific or extremely badly written, pretty much anything you can imagine on GNU/Linux is available on SmartOS. For those few isolated cases of badly written software, one can always run a Linux (lx) branded zone inside of SmartOS at bare metal speed[2][3]. [1] https://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/building-packages-at-scale.html https://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/building-packages-at-scale.h... [2] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/LX+Branded+Zones https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/LX+Branded+Zones [3] https://docs.joyent.com/sdc6/working-with-images/list-of-supported-operating-systems https://docs.joyent.com/sdc6/working-with-images/list-of-sup...