On a personal level I'm impressed and fascinated by the fact that apparently one man created and has maintained an illumos distro for many years;
* making an OS distro at all is hard
* making an illumos distro is harder (less precedent to work from, and IMHO Sun didn't do a great job documenting things if you weren't inside Sun)
* making a different distro is harder; this isn't an OpenIndiana rehash, AFAIK it's mostly novel
* and of course maintaining it for so long is a huge undertaking
I tried booting various Illumos distros through USB sticks on two different AM5 computers, and it got stuck very early on. I assume due to some incompatibility with USB 3.0. Meanwhile, a friend of mine booted on a Thinkpad just fine from a DVD.
PS: Thanks to Peter Tribble for providing this system.
Edit: I've just downloaded the basic (Tribblix 0m40) iso, dd'ed [see below] it to a smallish USB stick and booted an old Thinkpad. Boot succeeded and I was able to log in to the minimal live session. Haven't done more than that yet.
# dd if=tribblix-0m40.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1MInstalled on the Thinkpad T60 using the 'kitchen-sink' option to the install script following the instructions on the tribblix Web site. Left the USB stick in and rebooted and it did some first run stuff (you have to leave the usb stick plugged in at this stage).
Alas, it turns out that neither the ethernet nor the wifi are supported (dladm show-phys returns nothing and ifconfig shows loopback devices only).
The xfce desktop installation is quite nice, with emacs, vim and helix editors and Abiword/Gnumeric. Palemoon and Netsurf are available as graphical Web browsers.
xfce4 extras are not installed so automounting of storage does not work. An Oracle Solaris page mentioned rmmount so I was able to workout how to mount a usb stick at least.
Sometimes it is good to try something that works on a different basis to what you are used to - the contrast illuminates (lol) what you usually use.
I would have expected OpenLook. Xfce is ugly.
Retro will never die.