Comment by SwellJoe

I agree that GNU man pages suck. At least the atrocity that was "this man page is a stub, use info for the real docs" is gone now (I don't know if GNU stopped trying to force me to use info, or if distros fix it downstream). I have always hated info and the persistent nagging that GNU docs used to try to make people use it.

SmartOS is nice. I've always thought so and I have a lot of respect for the folks working on it. But, it isn't nice enough to overcome the negatives of being a tiny niche system. Linux has orders of magnitude more people working on it (and many of those people are also very smart). That's hard to beat.