I am a huge fan of SmartOS. Back in the 2010s (around 2012), I was advocating its use in production at a small startup I worked. The SunOS kernel, ZFS, zero install, immutable core, convenient way to manage containers and VMs together - all of this looked great on paper, especially containers.

In reality, I ended up running almost everything in VMs. The only thing worked well natively was nginx. MongoDB, Mysql, even our php backend (some libraries) had issues, unfortunately.

A year ago, I considered SmartOS again as a home lab driver, and no success again, Linux just has better support: drivers, pci passthrough, etc... and now with containers+vm through Proxmox or anything else. You can even run a k8s+kubevirt with zfs practically out of the box as a complete overkill though.

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abrookewood an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You can get some of that with IncusOS (https://linuxcontainers.org/incus-os/introduction/), which includes ZFS, immutability and manages both containers and VMs. I haven't used the OS yet, but have been enjoying Incus + Ubuntu.

	▲	rufugee 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Using incus heavily on Omarchy here and love it. I created a script to read yaml configs and create ephemeral incus containers with certain capabilities and certain directories mounted within. It's a wonderful experience for sandboxing Claude Code.

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fridder 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

not sure if you have given FreeBSD a chance yet and it has an in-progress jail/vm frontend: https://github.com/AlchemillaHQ/Sylve

	▲	rtaylorgarlock 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, very cool. Thanks for sharing; will try it out

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gr4vityWall 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These days, you're indeed better off using Illumos/SmartOS to run GNU/Linux zones/VMs, rather than native applications, from what I hear.

	▲	gigatexal 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you’re just going to run things in VMs then QubesOS one might as well

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Zaskoda 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So many PHP libraries are just wrappers for some other library. I think that's mostly a strength, but in this case it was clearly a weakness.