Hello gea, are you the developer for this OmniOS? What is it exactly? It sounds like a NAS/homeserver OS using ZFS, but I could be wrong. I have not been keeping up with this thread, but I am curious about what there is to offer here.
I personally have used FreeNAS and TrueNAS core in the past, and I am wondering, in what major ways does this differ? And what are the major selling points? Also, what is Napp It?
Thanks in advance.
Gea is part of napp-it, which I've been using for over 10 years now:
https://www.napp-it.org/index_en.html . For me, napp-it is a set of extensions and HTML UI that lets me administrate my ZFS storage systems more easily than living in the command line. I also use the paid extensions to get replication, better integration with Active Directory, and reporting.
Gea can always add more, but OmniOS is an entirely separate open source project forked from the Illumos Kernel (OpenSolaris), which is the project Oracle killed when they took over Sun. So illumos exists as a bare unix OS, while OmniOS exists as a downstream distribution with a hyper-focused mission of supporting ZFS Storage, BSD-style containers / virtualization, and software defined networking. It's benefit is that since its the core focus, the OS does not have as many packages to maintain, test dependencies for, and consume resources from. It's just a standard purpose-driven unix OS.
If you think of TrueNAS CORE as dedicated OS + Web UI for administration, OmniOS + napp-it is really the same thing. The difference being that napp-it is compatible with multiple solutions including SmartOS, Solaris, and to a lesser degree Linux.
As for selling points, I'll leave that to gea. I originally chose napp-it because they offered an OVA Appliance deployment option specifically meant to live inside VMware environments. That was a little more fickle in FreeNAS back in the day. I've since stuck with it because I like the Pro Extensions