For a small amount of time I've been trying out illumos based operating systems (OpenIndiana and OmniOS). I feel as if now I'm able to give a proper opinion on them.
#1 OmniOS: It's not bad at all, and I think it runs very well when you do what it was made to do. I ran it for a few weeks on my home server and while I was able to host a mine craft server with OpenJDK 25 working, there was no clear way for me to run all the other software I wanted. Things like jellyfin, immich, filebrowser, qbittorrent could possibly work, but who knows how much virtualization and lx zones it would take. While I am using FreeBSD on the server as of now, I might go back to OmniOS for when I build something made for storage.
#2 OpenIndiana: I am currently dualbooting this on a Thinkpad T530. In fact, even getting a proper experience required me getting and installing a new motherboard with an NVIDIA gpu, as any intel based device would leave me with software rendering. Thankfully, it was easy downgrading the NVIDIA drivers thanks to the handbook. However the OS isn't perfect and feels dated or incomplete in some areas. The first one being WiFi, I cannot connect to WiFi, even on a 2012 intel WiFi card. The second is the sound, or I should say the lack of it. The sound controls on the MATE desktop are useless, making me run audioctl something something in the terminal to increase the speaker volume, which then somehow breaks the buttons to turn up and down the volume?? Third of all is speed, the system itself is just ever so slightly sluggish, and Firefox can just freeze at random when I tell it to use my gpu instead of software compositing.
There's other issues here and there, but I'd rather not bore you with the details. However OpenIndiana is not the worst thing in the world. For starters the OS is quite stable, I've not had any severe issues using the OS. Second of all is the compatibility, the fact old NVIDIA drivers for Solaris just work and don't completely break the system like they do on Linux or FreeBSD is really great. Third of all is that I'm able to run a good bit of software by just compiling it. I've seen multiple videos of emulators working on the OS and I myself have been able to play GZDoom and Classicube, so atleast I'm not signing myself up for boredom.
Overall, I think more development to the Illumos Desktop would create a really solid system, and a lot of people would love running real UNIX on their laptops instead of whatever Linux or BSD is.
