Reader supplied reviews for OpenIndiana
Average rating
4.8 from 16 review(s)
Version: 2025.10
Rating: 10
Date: 2026-03-19
Country: United States
Votes: 1
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NetBSD user here, with a love note for OpenIndiana.
I always knew something was missing from my life before I met the Solaris family. Those folks with a twinkle in their eye; software that works, every-time, that integrates beautifully with ZFS, beadm, and zones; an open source lineage so grand it includes Ian Murdock himself, a closed source lineage so fine it stems from SysV Revision 4 code.
If all the world of operating systems were Fisher Price and Duplo, then this UNIX is to them is what the 9,090 piece Lego Titanic Model set is. Solaris (and by extension Opensolaris/Indiana) is an adult. It's real, it's mature, it doesn't compromise on you, it's the bar by which all platforms ought to be judged. It's a stone in a land of quicksand.
Thematic language aside, yes OpenIndiana appears stuck in time, but it doesn't even matter for the security updates keep coming out and I don't see why you shouldn't. Yes, the hardware support is limited, but seriously do not run this on anything infantile, it deserves better. And yes, the documentation is outdated, but who cares, Oracle hosts the manuals for it's parent Solaris, and many of them work seamlessly. And all the while, you can run Sun/Oracle software just like the real deal, rather than fight an outdated compatibility layer. And even better, you can do it with the base of a system that defined what it means to be mission critical. Who needs RHEL anyways?
To the OpenIndiana developers and their hard work, thank you for continuing to develop this platform. Illumos may be small, but it is my new home. To years of "distrohopping," bygone! And to NetBSD, thank you for pkgsrc, we love it. And to you, don't just use a VM; use real hardware and give it an earnest try, for it might just surprise you, like it did for I!
P.S. I promise you I don't work for Oracle lol.
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Version: 2025.10
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-11-16
Votes: 1
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This is the closest thing to an open source solaris 10/11 that you're gonna get in the current state of things. Sadly it does not support officially support SPARC, so there's that out of the way. Things work just like Solaris. Desktop packages are far out of date and tend to focus on security over features, which is no different to Solaris if you've ever used it. This OS is more at home on an older server that has say, a SAS card that doesn't like Linux. It's great because it's similar to solaris and can be administered in a similar manner. We have the same init system as Solaris and we can do pretty much anything you can do on regular Solaris. I wouldn't use this on a laptop or desktop unless it was in a VM or I was doing dev stuff, but my current server is running OpenIndiana and it seems to be doing fine for my use case. Just be prepared to compile everything!
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Version: 2022.10
Rating: 1
Date: 2023-09-10
Votes: 0
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Actually Security Release 2023.05
The latest release is apparently a 'security release' that deals with severe security Issue in illumos-gate (the underlying illumos kernel/operating system).
I downloaded the USB image & DDd it to a USB pendrive. It would not boot.
Derp: it's a '.usb' file: 'OI-hipster-gui-20230502.usb'.
I renamed it as a '.img' file & DDd it a USB pendrive. It booted.
It booted, and booted, and booted, .........., & went round & round in a boot loop, that destroyed GRUB, & nearly destroyed my boot sector and BIOS! It was no longer possible to boot from a USB pendrive. That's how bad it was.
This is little short of a bare-metal attack.
Fortunately, I was able to recover my engine, using the Dell/Ubuntu OEM recovery disk, and I discovered that the recovery disk can also be used to recover data, even from an encrypted /home folder, as long as you know the passphrase. Don't go straight to reinstall mode. Go to the drive address, and cancel, to go into a live session, whereby data can be recovered. This should be made more obvious. I discovered this by accident. (BTW, my data is always backed up, in triplicate.)
But I digress: apologies.
The fundamental point here is not only that the underlying illumos-gate is unsafe, but also that the 'security patch' effectively turns it into malware, on a Heartbleed level.
Fortunately, I am an advanced operator, who knows how to take time, and not go for the first solution & risk losing data. Less experienced operators would probably have lost their data.
Fundamentally, it is utterly heinous that OpenIndiana would release such an obviously untested update.
But then, they obviously do not even know how to suffix their file names.
I do not recommend OpenIndiana, to the extent that I consider it to be malware, & I would award it -10 if DistroWatch allowed.
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