Illumos is a Unix operating system which provides next-generation features
Competition from Linux has become very stiff. For me, Kubuntu 19.10 delivers on all of the promises that OpenSolaris made back in the day. My laptop has two 1TB SSDs in a ZFS mirror. Docker works as you&#x27;d hope, creating a new ZFS dataset for each container. I have remarkably good hardware support, everything just works. I&#x27;d say that the user experience rivals or beats MacOS or Windows, although at this point I&#x27;d say it is largely just a matter of preference.<p>Linux still lacks the multitenant security guarantees of Solaris Zones but this isn&#x27;t so bad. Hard multitenancy is a problem that only concerns a fairly small subset of people and even then, there are solutions. You can do hard multitenancy with Linux containers (namespaces&#x2F;cgroups to be pedantic) if you start restricting the system call table. There is also Firecracker[1] which obviously isn&#x27;t as efficient as Zones (because it uses VMs), but is proven in production and does provide additional security guarantees.<p>The technical advantages of Illumos are outweighed (or rivaled) at this point, in my opinion. When I show people things on my laptop, I always end up talking about the desktop cube in KDE or my neovim&#x2F;tmux&#x2F;zsh setup. Due to ZFS snapshots and the power of zfs send&#x2F;recv, I expect this system installation to last for years to come. No more reinstalls, we&#x27;re good, this operating system thing is covered.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;firecracker-microvm&#x2F;firecracker-containerd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;firecracker-microvm&#x2F;firecracker-container...</a>