SmartOS is still going strong with bi-weekly releases: https://us-central.manta.mnx.io/Joyent_Dev/public/SmartOS/sm...

And we use it in production for critical workloads and its fantastic :)

I don't think any mainstream OS ever dies - instead, they often enter the hobbyist realm. Amiga OS and VMS are still actively developed this purpose (just not something you'd use in production). I imagine it's the same for OpenIndiana as Solaris had a large user base back in the day.

OpenVMS[0] is very much primarily a commercial product that people use in production. The hobbyist program is secondary to that.

[0]: https://vmssoftware.com

Oxide Computer uses it, I think

https://oxide.computer/

Their distribution is called Helios and is based on OmniOS. I think they were supposed to make it more suitable for consumer use / home install at some point - the package repository is public if you want to try to cobble it together on your own.

Actually several docs in their repositories point to https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios which... doesn't exist??

It does seem derived (rather than based) from OmniOS indeed, so little to do with OpenIndiana (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33341193)

It's still private. I believe this is a case of "just gotta open it," but that takes some work (and I am not sure, I don't know all the details yet, I could be wrong). I have it on my to-do list to try and investigate this and get it done sometime soon, we'll see.

Hmm ok thanks!!

Yes I think a lot of people are very curious to get a peek, especially if they can't afford an actual oxide ;)

Oxide made of ex-joyent (smartos) people, some of which were also ex-sun people (Bryan Cantril for example)

> Serious question, I thought OpenIndiana was dead?

Commit history says it's alive.

> Is there any good alternative of Solaris lineage left? (That doesn't involve selling your soul to Oracle.)

I mean, this is it I'd think. There are other illumos distros, but this is the one most shaped like Solaris.

http://tribblix.org/ ?