I watched this presentation and was very impressed.

OmniOS is a minimalist illumos-based release (or an illumos distro). And illumos is a fork of OpenSolaris.

I've been using Fedora Linux for some years as my main OS, but I'm a little tired of the pace of it's continuous updates. I wondering if I should run OmniOS as my base and run Fedora and others in KVM virtual machines. I wonder if that would give me a more stable environment for my other OSes which I currently experiment with in virtual machines.

Has anyone used OmniOS? Is it ready? What was your impression?

What's so special about Illumos kernel?

Regards.

PrinceCruise, I think it's best to watch the presentation. I found it to be very informative. It's not the Kernel that makes it special it's their ease of building a bare OS from the ground up based on Solaris with very few commands. OmniOS respects the ABI of previous Solaris releases (<=10). I've not used it myself but they have a lot of cool information about ZFS in that video which I didn't know was possible.

Sure sag47, I'll watch the video in my spare time. I really liked Solaris 9 when I started my career as an assistant UNIX admin. Later on totally shifted focus on Linux.
I do understand that Oracle virtually killed Solaris, however I don't understand the concept of multiple forks e.g. OpenSolaris(?), OpenIndiana, Illumos etc. That's a Linux way of doing things, as in fragmentation.

Regards.

From my understanding, the ABI helps to keep compatibility with any one of these forks. As long as a developer develops against Solaris (<=10) then their application will run fine in any of those forks because of ABI being adhered. Very interesting and different from my life in Linux where an upgrade might break everything. Unfortunately RHEL 6 doesn't support LVM on the root partition but RHEL 7 might. If that's the case then I might get snapshot capability before/after upgrading the OS in which case is similar to how they discuss using snapshots in ZFS for upgrading. That'd be cool and make roll backs easier in my case.

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I don't yet know if it's great. That's why I'm asking.

But I've been aware for years that Solaris has a very loyal following of people who think it's superior to everything else. That interests me, though I've only used Solaris myself a handful of times. So I was very excited when Sun released OpenSolaris and stated their intent to compete with Linux. Excellent! Competition makes everyone sharper and better. And the competition would probably draw some interest away from Windows.

But Oracle swallowed Sun whole and snuffed out the fire. I know they still offer Solaris, and I've been meaning to install it and try it, but I'm not excited about it. Oracle is too much like Microsoft.

But the illumos kernel follows in the open tradition. I've been loosely following it's development, wondering which distro would be stable enough to not disappoint. So I'm wondering if OmniOS is it.

The thing from the presentation that interested me most is what sag47 mentioned: ABI stability. Also, it makes sense to me to move volatile Fedora to a virtual machine under a small stable OS that's not often updated. OmniOS might be it. (I would probably continue to use Fedora to do work.)

Also, I've been ignoring the hype about ZFS, but this guy raved about it enough that I'm starting to take a look at it. I've found ZFS is available on Fedora, but I wonder if it's integrated well enough.