SmartOS
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 26 of 87 operating systems by recommenders
Fans praise its USB-bootable design, ZFS-based VM hosting, zone management and CLI tooling. Common caveat: it is niche, with weaker driver support and more friction than Linux.
Fans praise its USB-bootable design, ZFS-based VM hosting, zone management and CLI tooling. Common caveat: it is niche, with weaker driver support and more friction than Linux.
26 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 20
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 77%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 20 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Zones make hypervisor management easy
“The global zone works great as a hypervisor if you prefer working over SSH in a real shell”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “SmartOS” “it's zone management is great and the webui they've been working on is pretty cool too”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “illumos” “SmartOS running hypervisor duties on zones and bhyve”
Comment from 21 May 2026 in “FatGid: FreeBSD 14.x kernel local privilege escalation” - Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “Static Web Hosting on the Intel N150”
Stable and reliable in production
“Illumos is also very stable at this point so most of the churn is managed up front”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “SmartOS” “we never had any dataloss from failed disks, sure fifo and smartos had their warts”
Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “SmartOS” “I ran SmartOS in production and enjoyed it thoroughly.”
Comment from 13 Aug 2026 in “Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)” - Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in ALL Linux distributions for 15 years”
Boots from USB, runs VMs on ZFS
“If I want something designed to boot from a USB stick that runs VMs off of ZFS pools, the only option where this is the”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “SmartOS” “SmartOS was designed to boot reliably from USB flash storage”
Comment from 26 Jun 2026 in “Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus” Good CLI and simple tooling
“nice tooling that makes common tasks simple but not so opinionated you have to de-abstract things to get under the hood”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “Incus-OS: Immutable Linux OS to run Incus as a hypervisor” “I enjoy the CLI tooling very much.”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “SmartOS”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Friction from Linux-centric software
“lots of small annoyances stemming from the world expecting you to be running Linux instead of Solaris”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “SmartOS” “Until you OOM ... Have fun with the kernel implementation differences between Solaris and linux”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “SmartOS” Niche ecosystem, more work for little gain
“I enjoy the tooling very much but it's so niche that I'm wary of using it for Customer engagements.”
Comment from 21 Jan 2026 in “SmartOS” “SmartOS sounds like a lot of work, for negligible or even negative benefit.”
Comment from 25 Jan 2026 in “SmartOS”
Other operating systems people recommend
The four most recommended other operating systems, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 87 operating systems, rankedWhat people said
32 of the 33 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I ran SmartOS in production and enjoyed it thoroughly.”
“We run all critical services on SmartOS nowadays.”
“SmartOS was designed to boot reliably from USB flash storage”
“SmartOS running hypervisor duties on zones and bhyve”
“SmartOS sounds like a lot of work, for negligible or even negative benefit.”
“Until you OOM ... Have fun with the kernel implementation differences between Solaris and linux”
“we never had any dataloss from failed disks, sure fifo and smartos had their warts”
“I just can't understand why we get handwaving and assurances instead of any meat.”
“Illumos is also very stable at this point so most of the churn is managed up front”
“It's definitely won me over with the NetBSD pkgsrc package manager”
“still going strong under new ownership”
“The whole thing just feels very thoughtfully put together.”
“my problems with that started when i needed a lot more, the sysadmin/devops/whatever story doesn't scale”
“you're indeed better off using Illumos/SmartOS to run GNU/Linux zones/VMs”
“They only had good things to say about it.”
“The global zone works great as a hypervisor if you prefer working over SSH in a real shell”
“SmartOS is pretty minimal and has been pretty straightforward to manage”
“I enjoy the CLI tooling very much.”
“frankly I'd just install Talos or SmartOS on the metal like god intended.”
“it's zone management is great and the webui they've been working on is pretty cool too”
“Real Actual RBAC, and in-kernel smb service.”
“great product. sadly dead! bought up by Samsung and now the briantrust has left to go work at a much cooler place”
“lots of small annoyances stemming from the world expecting you to be running Linux instead of Solaris”
“Linux just has better support: drivers, pci passthrough, etc...”
“seems like an awesome way to do all sorts of things”
“annoying elitism that made them not care about working with the community”
“I enjoy the tooling very much but it's so niche that I'm wary of using it for Customer engagements.”
“Pleasantly surprised to see SmartOS and zones used.”
“SmartOS locks it up and makes it super hard to see understand why it failed.”
“nice tooling that makes common tasks simple but not so opinionated you have to de-abstract things to get under the hood”
“It's really nice to see projects outside of the Linux/BSD hegemony still exploring new approaches to the server.”
“If I want something designed to boot from a USB stick that runs VMs off of ZFS pools, the only option where this is the”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.