On a personal level I'm impressed and fascinated by the fact that apparently one man created and has maintained an illumos distro for many years;

* making an OS distro at all is hard

* making an illumos distro is harder (less precedent to work from, and IMHO Sun didn't do a great job documenting things if you weren't inside Sun)

* making a different distro is harder; this isn't an OpenIndiana rehash, AFAIK it's mostly novel

* and of course maintaining it for so long is a huge undertaking

I tried booting various Illumos distros through USB sticks on two different AM5 computers, and it got stuck very early on. I assume due to some incompatibility with USB 3.0. Meanwhile, a friend of mine booted on a Thinkpad just fine from a DVD.

I would have expected OpenLook. Xfce is ugly.

Retro will never die.