OpenIndiana Illumos Distro (opens in new tab)

SmartOS is still going strong with bi-weekly releases: https://us-central.manta.mnx.io/Joyent_Dev/public/SmartOS/sm...

I don't think any mainstream OS ever dies - instead, they often enter the hobbyist realm. Amiga OS and VMS are still actively developed this purpose (just not something you'd use in production). I imagine it's the same for OpenIndiana as Solaris had a large user base back in the day.

Oxide Computer uses it, I think

https://oxide.computer/

> Serious question, I thought OpenIndiana was dead?

Commit history says it's alive.

> Is there any good alternative of Solaris lineage left? (That doesn't involve selling your soul to Oracle.)

I mean, this is it I'd think. There are other illumos distros, but this is the one most shaped like Solaris.

http://tribblix.org/ ?

Unfortunately, there are still some proprietary blobs:

https://illumos.org/docs/about/faq/#is-illumos-free-software...

https://illumos.org/docs/developers/build/#getting-the-close...

There's an effort to support it: https://dlc.openindiana.aurora-opencloud.org/SPARC/

I think it doesn't have much support because the majority of SPARC gear out there runs better with SunOS. Solaris was a big jump up in processing requirements.

Any illumos distro will be better at ZFS than anything Linux-based. Granted, the amount will vary by distro; last I saw, Ubuntu had relatively good support. Beyond that, I'm personally quite fond of the overall design and polish of openindiana, at least. One example is how it automatically handles ZFS snapshots and boot environments with the package manager - all the pieces are there to do that on other systems, but setting up the integration is harder.