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Discussion on: Choosing a Linux distro

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Thomas H Jones II

illumos was born as SunOS in the early 80s)

The SunOS that Illumos was born from was SunOS 5/Solaris — originally a SysV-derived OS. The 80s SunOS that was derived from BSD was SunOS 4.

Illumos was one of the projects I played with late in the part of my career where I was Solaris engineer for a a global ISP. A number of us looked at Illumos and Nexenta because Oracle kept throwing the viability of OpenSolaris in doubt ...before eventually killing it altogether. Both were options where we could have Solaris-y systems at home, keeping our work-related skills up, without having to pay to run Solaris.

and a loyal fanbase without the init system war.

Mostly because all of the people that slit their wrists over Solaris's SMF left the field. And, let me tell you, when Solaris 10 (SunOS 5.10) came out, the hue and cry about SMF was similar to that around systemd. ;)