SmartOS is definitely not intended to be used as a desktop system, but it can work great as a home server if you have some spare hardware. OpenIndiana is anoth

SmartOS is definitely not intended to be used as a desktop system, but it can work great as a home server if you have some spare hardware. OpenIndiana is another Illumos distro that can be used as a desktop. You get all of the core benefits of Illumos (zones, zfs, dtrace). The big downside is that you don't get the nice tools for managing zones/vms that SmartOS provides (vmadm/imgadm). FreeBSD has ported a lot of the best features from Illumos so it could also work for you. Just remember that an OS is only worth running if it has DTrace.