VMs and containers like SmartOS, but Linux-based?

I'm running SmartOS in a home environment since a few years. What I like about it: It's so easy to create virtual machines, and for each one it's just a flag if I want it to be based on hardware virtualization (they use KVM for that) or on container technology (they use Solaris "zones" for that.) So both, KVM-VMs and containers are first-class citizen, and managed exactly the same way. It's just a flag that is switched. However, SmartOS has some drawbacks in a home environment: no USB 3 support, non-standard package manager, no native Linux in containers, ... So I'm looking for something Linux-based that preserves the easy VM/container management of SmartOS (and hopefully even the awesome ZFS-based storage system for VMs and containers.) I've been looking into libvirt, but there containers seem to be a different animal from VMs, e.g. image handling is completely different. Any recommendations on how I achieve the goals described under Linux with open source tools?

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