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Tribblix – The Retro Illumos Distribution
I was just thinking this morning, to write a blog post with a small tour of niche-but-functional operating systems. Tribblix and Dragonfly BSD were at the top of my list. I've been also thinking Haiku, RISC OS, 9front, MINIX... They've all been around for decades, and usually fly under the radar.
One thing I am curious about is its version of ZFS. Would it be incompatible with OpenZFS from a Linux/FreeBSD system?
Zfs on linux is its own project with a lot of development to make it run well on Linux

That answers the Linux part of your question

I really like (and have used in production) the ability to run Solaris Zones (containers) and "LX zones" which are Linux containers side by side on the same hardware.

Many installation problems show up in the handling of USB3 and related quirks; I have a lovely AMD 8350 system that I can't install from USB onto because of some XHCI problem. The USB stick will boot the kernel, but then the kernel can't properly handle the USB stick after it has booted and can't see the installation media. I suppose I should bite the bullet and burn a CD to boot from, which should fix it.

That shouldn't be a fundamental problem with current Tribblix - due to this sort of problem the installer got modified so that once the bootloader has pulled the ramdisk off the usb stick it doesn't need it again (although if it can't see it it won't be able to install any packages from it, falling back to dragging them across the network).
Sometimes it feels like keeping old systems alive is harder than keeping an old car running.
The Illumos' family is an interesting one. I wish it was easier to get it installed on modern hardware. Any of my attempts with distros like OpenIndiana, Tribblix and OmniOS didn't go further than the boot menu.

I wonder how far a compatibility layer for Linux drivers could go to help other UNIX kernels' usability. Maybe the Oxide folks know more of what would be involved in such an effort.

  • ori_b
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> I wonder how far a compatibility layer for Linux drivers could go to help other UNIX kernels' usability

This isn't very interesting. It means you're constrained to the Linux design decisions, and you're wasting time debugging mismatches and poor design decisions.

It also creates a licensing issue. Part of the reason Linux has so many drivers is because the GPL requires all of the kernel code be provided to users under the GPL as well. If you link to that in your OS/distribution now all of your code must be published in the same way.
  • JdeBP
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That's the wrong solution to the problem, as it means learning a second kernel and all of its stuff and making compatibility shims, whilst still facing the real problem that is not software at all.

The right solution is actually explained the headlined WWW site, where Peter Tribble points out (in the About page and in the Use guide) that the significant constraint is that xe does not own the actual physical hardware to develop against. It's the usual story with small projects: good donated hardware, and developer time (and workspace, and food, and water, and housing, and electricity supply (-:), needed.

> lightweight window managers are preferred over heavy desktop environments, the primary desktop option is Xfce, and MATE and Enlightenment are also available, plus many others

I would expected CDE as a first class citizen and maybe OpenLook.

And it says that it it maily for 32bit SPARC and 32bit X86 and later that "Important: 32-bit hardware support now completely removed.".

There are over 30 desktop options (including quite a few of the older window managers, which is a bit of a blast from the past).

I do include CDE and Open Look (the window manager and toolkit, at least). In both cases the add-on tools that were present in Solaris (like the whole of the DeskSet suite) aren't available, because they were never released in source form.

They have an overlay for both:

http://www.tribblix.org/overlay-cde.html

http://www.tribblix.org/overlay-openlook.html

I've been looking for a linux distribution that has olwm available but have had little luck. The closest I can find is a theme for icewm.
me as well, olvwm was last time in Debian Jessie, now only on NetBSD as package
  • pabs3
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Looks like Debian removed olvwm/olwm because they were incompatible with 64-bit and unmaintained.

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/xview https://tracker.debian.org/news/1000764/removed-32p14-282-fr... https://bugs.debian.org/911787

It's never going to be maintained...

But there is a 64-bit port (which I ought to bring in to Tribblix)

https://github.com/ggodd/xview-64bit

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