When Nexenta Systems decided to discontinue Nexenta OS in late 2011, they announced its replacement: Illumian, a new illumos-based distribution that would use Debian-style packaging instead of the IPS packaging system used by OpenIndiana and other illumos distributions.

The rationale was that Debian packaging was more familiar to Linux administrators and would lower the barrier to entry for the illumos ecosystem. In theory, this was a reasonable idea — APT and dpkg are among the most well-understood package management tools in the industry.

Illumian 1.0 was released in February 2012. And then... nothing. The project produced no further releases, no significant updates, and no community materialized around it. Within the illumos community, the reception ranged from indifferent to hostile. Some community members accused Nexenta of creating Illumian as a 'farce' — a project that existed on paper to justify killing Nexenta OS while Nexenta Systems focused entirely on its commercial NexentaStor product.

The accusation had some merit. Nexenta's commercial interests had shifted toward enterprise storage appliances, where the community distribution was more of a cost center than an asset. By creating Illumian and then neglecting it, Nexenta could claim they hadn't abandoned the community — they'd just 'transitioned' it to a new project that happened to immediately stall.

Illumian's lifespan — from announcement to effective death — was less than a year, making it one of the shortest-lived distributions in the Solaris ecosystem. OpenIndiana, meanwhile, continued as the primary community illumos distribution.

Illumian's rapid death reinforced the illumos community's skepticism of corporate-backed distributions. OpenIndiana continued as the primary community illumos distribution, while Nexenta focused entirely on its commercial products.