# illumos

21 Hacker News commenters recommended illumos and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Open source Solaris descendant that people run on servers, home servers and ZFS storage, valued for zones and Solaris features. One critic reports stock builds lacked DHCPv6 prefix delegation.

## Why people recommend it

- Still actively developed Solaris lineage (4 comments): "Illumos is still actively developed, open source, and can trace its lineage back to actual unix." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46393978)) "Illumos is a traditional operating system that goes from the kernel to the systemd layer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46712133)) "fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48677629))
- Zones for containers and isolation (4 comments): "we have benefitted tremendously from features (ZFS, SMF, FMA, Zones, bhyve, etc.)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46711486)) "Illumos had a really nice stack for running containers inside jails and zones" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46316674)) "Zones provide full security isolation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724661))
- Viable modern option for servers (3 comments): "The BSD/Illumos OSs are used quite frequently as the base OS for high end commercial/enterprise network, SAN, NAS etc. solutions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46104437)) "a real modern viable option over Linux (and *racle Solaris) for server hardware" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49794492)) "I really enjoy working with illumos on my home server" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46709517))
- ZFS and Solaris features (2 comments): "I used to do something like this but with ZFS on an OpenSolaris / Illumos storage server" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45856833)) "we have benefitted tremendously from features (ZFS, SMF, FMA, Zones, bhyve, etc.)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46711486))

## What people warn about

- Seen as behind the times (1 comments): "these always seemed simultaneously ahead and behind the times" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46709700))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Windows](https://hackerapproved.com/p/windows.md): 1287 recommend
- [macOS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/macos.md): 1041 recommend
- [Linux](https://hackerapproved.com/p/linux.md): 745 recommend
- [Haiku](https://hackerapproved.com/p/haiku-os.md): 115 recommend
- [NetBSD](https://hackerapproved.com/p/netbsd.md): 100 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "illumos", https://hackerapproved.com/p/illumos/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).