More eyes and hands means better faster security patches and similar issues. That's why I don't use "three guys and a github" specialized linux distros. If you follow a similar outlook (and what works for me might not work for you) then a crude google search result indicates the community for freebsd is about 30 times more talkative (30 times bigger?) and some more wikipedia searches reveal freebsd is five times the age WRT stability.
I have never heard of Illumos which also implies I've never heard anything bad about it. Although I do personally know people who swear by freebsd, so ...
I would probably use a *bsd to avoid all possibility of systemd issues, and
implies the big "thing" for freebsd is "usable for any purpose" which is the old Debian "universal OS" concept I like so much.
I would strongly consider openbsd for something bare out on the internet not behind a stateful firewall and my limited experience with netbsd is its pretty awesome but being able to boot on a PDP11 necessitates some excessive old code. I'm astounded by retroBSD on PIC32 arch.
Thank you for the explanation--I'm looking at different high-reliability OS's for long-time embedded deployments, and xBSD flavors are looking pretty promising.
For me, package management on OpenIndiana sucks. OpenCSW doesn't support IPS yet, the Oracle IPS repo is way outdated, and the SmartOS/pkgsrc packages don't install/build correctly. Compare this with my FreeBSD setup, where I'm building my own package repository with poudriere (which also handles my build customizations) and easily pushing packages and configuration data with Salt. I was especially disappointed with pkgsrc, since I figured that would be easy to get running.
That said, I haven't had a chance to try other Illumos distributions like SmartOS or OpenSXCE. Maybe the sysadmin experience is better on them.
