Packaging software and software updates. SmartOS uses NetBSD's pkgsrc, which is an interesting choice given the fact that BSDs have a very bad track record for packaging. FreeBSD still doesn't package their base system, and the recommended way of dealing with software on BSD systems is to compile it from source.

Compiling from source? pkgsrc, and by extension SmartOS, fully supports installing binary packages. The command to do this is called pkg_add. pkg_rm uninstalls a binary package. SmartOS even went a step further and uses pkgin, which works exactly the same way as apt-get. Please read pkg_add's and pkgin's manual pages before arguing further on this point.

Also here is a short document which clearly illustrates how a binary package is created and installed with pkgsrc:

http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/creating-local-smartos-packag...

and here is another document pointing out how SmartOs has a nearly 14,000 package library of the latest version of software which normally runs on Linux; versions of which are usually newer than on Linux, and it is built fresh every day into binary packages, completely automatically:

https://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/building-packages-at-scale.h...

So there's one problem that SmartOS didn't solve first, and I'd argue hasn't solved yet either.

And based on your response, I'd argue that you haven't seen or used anything but Linux.

I'm far from being dishonest, and in fact I communicated exactly what my motivation is, and I'm sorry but it's really not my fault you haven't read SmartOS and Solaris documentation. That would be akin to me claiming that Linux is better than FreeBSD but without knowing enough about FreeBSD.

For example, your question about grsecurity+pax is nonsensical in the context of SmartOS: being Solaris based, it doesn't need Linux specific technology like grsecurity. That was precisely my point, if you use a well designed system, all of this Linux hacked-up nonsense goes away, because it was nonsense to begin with. SmartOS has a secure kernel by design, and further delineation can be achieved with role based access control.

It also doesn't need a lightweight virtual machine consisting of a single application because it has zones, and also because there would be nothing to reap your process at the end, and you'd end up with a zombie, an unreaped orphan process. I'm surprised that you don't know that Docker had to re-invent a kludgy copy of init precisely because of this problem, or else you would not have asked me that.

As for insisting on Docker because it's popular, it's flawed picking something based on popularity; if you pick a solution, it should be because it's technically sound and therefore robust, so that you can sleep through the nights when you're on-call without incidents, and read newspapers and drink your espresso during the day because the damn thing just runs and runs without needing any babysitting, like Linux does all the time.

To claim that SmartOS has no development tools, when it readily offers all the popular frameworks, languages, and has the most advanced linkers and compilers in existense us beyond obscene, I'm afraid. Please read the manual pages on the link editor, ld, and the Sun Studio compilers to get an inkling of what I'm writing about. It will tremendously help the quality of our discussion.