You realize that you're just talking in ad hominem circles? You acknowledge that there are reasons that a "reasonable and technically competent person might choose an illumos system"; is it as least possible that someone advocating that choice might not be merely "a random crank on the Internet"? And given that this is potentially a reasonable choice, how does advocating it represent "a very poor grasp of [...] everything"? If there are specific technical arguments to make here, please make them; the repeated personal attack is unwarranted -- and unpersuasive.

Yes, I find the whole article so full of wrong that I didn't think it needed more than simply calling it "wrong". Though seeing how many upvotes it now has, I guess I was wrong.

But, if you insist, let's break it down a bit:

"...FreeBSD...also ships with ZFS as part of the kernel and has a jails which is a much more baked technology and implementation than LXC."

Which is an assertion that would require significant citation and specification about the ways in which the author believes jails to be superior in order to be a useful claim. I believe it is an assertion based on ignorance of either Jails or LXC, or the ways those technologies have been used historically and are being used today. For most of the uses I see talked about on HN, LXC is the "more baked" implementation. While Jails has existed for a long time, it was not intended for the purposes we're using LXC for today in Docker and similar deployments. The tools exist, the resource management exists, for LXC and they don't, or are quite rudimentary for jails. To suggest someone choose jails where they are currently using Docker and LXC is to suggest they live with a large variety of limitations and pain points, and in a lot of cases to simply not do what they are currently doing, or to do it in wildly different ways. All to avoid the minor pain that is represented by SystemD for most users.

In short: Jails are not (currently) a reasonable alternative to LXC in that context, and it exhibits some kind of ignorance to suggest them.

Continuing on, despite your suggestion that he is talking about SmartOS or OmniOS, he quite clearly is not. He specifically mentions Solaris while mentioning the others as other options:

"Speaking of zones and Solaris, if that’s an option for you it’s probably the best of breed stack right now. Rich mature OS-level virtualization. SmartOS brings along KVM support for when you HAVE to run Linux but backed by Solaris tech under the hood. There’s also OmniOS as a variant as well."

That paragraph clearly is recommending Solaris, specifically. If you'd like to argue that Solaris is a reasonable alternative for most Linux users, it's a conversation I'm going to opt out of. I'm pretty sure we'd be speaking completely different languages.

"If you absolutely MUST run Linux, my recommendation is to minimize the interaction with the base distro as much as possible. CoreOS (when it’s finally baked and production ready) can bring you an LXC based ecosystem."

So, CoreOS is the Linux option he recommends? The same CoreOS that uses SystemD? Indeed, was among the first distros to embrace SystemD with gusto. CoreOS, that is remarkably different than all other Linux distros. All because "Linux is becoming something different than it was"? So, in response to Linux becoming something different, he recommends people switch to something that is utterly different, like an entirely different operating system (FreeBSD, Solaris(!), etc.) or a Linux distribution that rethinks everything, not just the init system (CoreOS).

All to avoid something being different. It absolutely boggles my mind, and I have hard time responding with anything other than derision; for that, I apologize.

You're right that I haven't been particularly persuasive, and have been quite abrasive. This article just really rubbed me the wrong way.

"That paragraph clearly is recommending Solaris, specifically."

He says, as he quotes a paragraph that specifically calls out SmartOS and OmniOS -- both of which are under the IllumOS branch of OpenSolaris.

"So, CoreOS is the Linux option he recommends? The same CoreOS that uses SystemD?"

The problem he's raising isn't that linux is going to be different, and if you think it is you need to re-read. Try doing it with your --with-reading-comprehension switch. It being different is just a statement of fact, the problem statement was separate.

CoreOS is not a distribution in the classic sense. It is a platform for deploying containers, and in the use-case they've setup the author clearly believes it will allow you to still be successful in spite of systemd.

It is a terrible article, I think we can all agree.

Its CoreOS point is stunningly ignorant.

However, Zones and Jails are a good substitute for LXC; they are not yet such a good fit for the Docker way of using containers, which is somewhat different. But for a whole system image type model like LXC they are both great.

SmartOS is doint great things with Linux compatibility, both through emulation and KVM, it is worth looking at.