Nexenta: Power of Solaris with usability of Linux? Not yet

Being a newbie Solaris user, I discovered what seasoned admins know: this system has its strengths, but daily administration tasks are a pain in the ass. Really neat and modern solutions like SMF coexist with software that looks like it comes straight from 1970s. Simple process of software patch could take hours.

Then I discovered Nexenta. It's the OS distribution that combines OpenSolaris kernel and some system software with userspace from Debian and Ubuntu - including APT! Just imagine - a system with ZFS, SMF, zones and at the same time - proper package manager, sane directory tree and thousands of apps. I downloaded Nexenta 3.0 Beta and installed it into a VM right away.

First impression was positive. The installation was simple, after booting I got a bash shell instead of lousy sh. But it didn't take me a minute to run into a first bug. I tried using aptitude to see available packages and immediately discovered it doesn't react to keystrokes (appareantly, it's a long known bug). Say goodbye to my dream of proper package manager. Some other text-mode software had issues with keyboard and fonts as well. Now, after a few days of testing (read: playing around), I think this system is promising, but it requires a lot of work before it's usable. Just installing the packages you can see that some of them were taken from Linux without much modification - their pre/post install scripts try to mess with Linux-specific files in /proc or modify Upstart settings.

I can't recommend Nexenta to neither server nor desktop. I doubt it'll ever be able to become an alternative to Solaris with the small number of developers the project has. I hope it'll serve as a testbed for ideas to be implemented in (Open)Solaris and in a few years we'll see more convergence between Linux and Solaris.