Software

SmartOS expects comfort with UNIX — it doesn’t have a GUI, doesn’t follow systemd conventions, and doesn’t pretend to be Linux.

This setup doesn’t feel like a workaround — it’s more like the way containers should’ve always run on Windows. No VMs to babysit, no constant switching between OS contexts. Just one system that runs both sides well enough. It’s not flawless, but once in place, it rarely gets in the way. And that, for most people, is exactly what’s needed.

Podman isn’t trying to reinvent containers. It just strips them down to what actually matters — processes, namespaces, isolation — without hiding what’s going on. No central service. No mandatory root access. No background daemon sitting between the user and the container runtime.

Kimchi-ng isn’t built for managing thousands of VMs or integrating with a billing platform.
There’s no HA clustering. No REST API. No native container support.