SmartOS

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SmartOS Reviews

SmartOS is the worst!

written by Jakob Poul on 2020-09-17 20:10:55

Overall

Ease of Use

Customer Service

Value For Money

Overall Opinion: SmartOS is in decline, ever since Samsung bought Joyent. Samsung is not an enterprise tech company unlike DellEMC, HPE, Cisco, etc. Therefore, SmartOS is a second-class citizen. SmartOS was supposed to be a hybrid VM/container host, but you can really only run SmartOS or older Linux distros, making it not useful for workloads like Docker, Kubernetes, etc. Since no commercial apps support SmartOS, it's just a VM host. Why not JUST USE VMWARE OR PROXMOX?

Pros: Nothing.

Cons: SmartOS is a dead OS. Joyent likes to tell that SmartOS is "compatible" with Linux containers, yet LX zones are behind their Windows and FreeBSD counterparts. Joyent claims that SmartOS is "container native", yet THEY SHUT DOWN THEIR "container native" PUBLIC CLOUD AND ASKED PEOPLE TO GO TO VM HOSTS. Self-hosted SmartOS only supports SmartOS or older Linux distros, not good in the fast-moving Linux world. SmartOS has no documentation when compared to Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and VMware.

Jakob Poul is using SmartOS a couple of times per year recently.

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