Well true, and I apologize.

Gladly accepted.

I have done some packaging for Debian, CentOS and recently Alpine and whilst the systems are smartly designed and effective, using them is neither easy nor enjoyable.

I cannot write anything of Alpine Linux, as I have never used it, but I have done Debian / Ubuntu packaging and configuration management with packages, and that, compared to RHEL / SLES / SmartOS / Solaris / HP-UX / IRIX, was the hardest to get right.

One of the reasons why Debian and Ubuntu are so hard to get right is that the Debian packaging guidelines are insane: for example, it is not allowed to have packages named in any way other than lowercase; there is no /opt, as the Debian people do not understand the filesystem hierarchy standard and consider it a hindrance, for reasons completely unknown to me.

So now imagine you had to build, say, your own PHP with OCI8 support: you cannot name the package php, nor can you deliver it into /usr, because the next upgrade from Debian could break your production. And there is no /opt, so neither vendors nor other 3rd parties have a place to safely deliver their software (/usr/local is not it, and is against standards).

What I'm trying to say is, you picked one of the worst operating systems, ever. Even RHEL, as bad as it is, is nowhere nearly as poorly designed as Debian GNU/Linux.

Pick a better OS. pkgsrc format is pretty straightforward, and AT&T SVR4 packaging[1] is the absolute best when it comes to doing configuration management. Unbeatable.

This might not be your cup of tea, obviously it wastes system resources, but it does simplify the ordeal.

If delivering software which JustWorks(SM) is an ordeal, then you need to step back and seriously re-think what needs to be corrected. Delivering software should be a breeze, and it should happen automatically, meaning that the software management subsystem of the OS should worry about it for you. But that also requires you to seriously revise how you put software together, because if it's an ordeal for you, something is majorly wrong. (Since I don't know your situation, I cannot comment what.)

Or they could use Docker and focus their energy on building value for their company so at some point it can afford to employ proper system administrators. Who then may or may not decide to migrate the systems to SmartOS.

This line of thinking, is, in my experience, completely, utterly incorrect on several levels:

developers should not act as if system administration is beneath them. One can never, ever become a master developer without becoming a top-notch system administrator: how can anyone develop software which is correctly integrated and runs on an operating system, if they do not understand how to administer that system? I have seen that over and over and over again in my decades of experience, and I have seen no developer who was able to code quality software which the system administrators didn't hate, because it was all hacked up and required lots of hacking to get working.

I just think that if knowledge-intensive engineering can be avoided it is worthwhile. Especially when an operation is young.

If you do that, it will come back to haunt you. With a vengeance. And the reason it will come back to haunt the company is because it's taking on a huge technical debt.

Are you familiar with the concept of taking on technical debt?

[1] http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/