Boot environments are one of those magic features that when you've used it, it's hard to give up. My NAS has long been on OpenIndiana. Boot environments mean zero risk OS upgrades. At one point I could have gone back to a 4 year old OS version and booted it with no data loss. You can create one at any time, so it brings an even better take on VM snapshots to the physical machine world. Hacking on something and want a…
how do you like using OI day to day on your NAS? Any pitfalls or things to be aware of?
It's sometimes a bit behind in software versions, eg the package manager version of Rust was a bit old, but Rustup worked. But there are crates that aren't compatible. Rust came up for me because I wanted to use Garage S3.
Managing services is different. The systemd haters would probably have a fit with the XML file format and general usage, but it's not hard.
But in all honesty I really like it as an OS. It's never limited me in any real way except for one Rust crate that was needed for Garage S3 that wouldn't compile. It needs zero maintenance. I update the OS (which takes one command) just to stay current. I think I had 450 days uptime on it once when I was busy travelling for work. Personally it's an under rated line of operating systems (OpenIndiana/Illumos/OmniOS).
I use Napp-It as the ZFS management interface but that isn't a hard requirement, it's just very nice.