The decision was made years ago. Back then, if you wanted to use a stable ZFS in production, OpenSolaris derivatives (Illumos, SmartOS, OmniOS) seemed the best

The decision was made years ago. Back then, if you wanted to use a stable ZFS in production, OpenSolaris derivatives (Illumos, SmartOS, OmniOS) seemed the best choice. And amongst these choices, SmartOS, which basically is a sort of Hypervisor (it just boots into a simple, bare OS from USB stick, then you provision your virtual hosts), was the most matching for a server task. That was even before OmniOS existed. Also, back then, there were no containers, or they were just in their early phase. Solaris had "Zones". Since this is a home-server, I wanted to run different virtual servers on one machine in my living room. Perfect match. And while Linux has caught up in many regards, I still find it attractive, that so many features are part of the original design, rather than stuff put on top of it, aftermarket. It's just a much more cleaner experience.