Traditional basin-type solar stills are not as popular due to their lower productivity, but a number of ways have been developed globally to increase their production capacity. This article demonstrates an overview of the recent studies aimed at improving the productivities and the effective functioning of conventional solar stills. In order to have a better insight of the thermal performance, the studies focused on evaluating the thermodynamic efficiencies of solar stills have also been reviewed and found that active solar distillation has strong potential in enhancing the performance characteristics of basin type systems. It was observed that, enormous efforts made by various researchers in understanding and improving the thermal characteristics of solar stills for better output have been majorly examined in hotter and arid regions, and solar stills for colder regions need an attention too. In this context, the proposed work attempts to carry out an experimental study to assess the effect of lower ambient conditions on performance characteristics of an active solar in an Indian cold hilly location. The observations from the study showed that the effective daily output of the active solar still was as high as twice the daily distillate output produced by the conventional passive still. The thermodynamic efficiencies of the active system were also evaluated. Further, during different sunny days, the variation in average exergy and energy efficiencies of the active system ranged from 14.86 to 16.18% and 1.95–2.41%, respectively. Due to the prevailing storing effect, the nocturnal productivity of solar still was increased at deeper water levels. The study also helped to conclude that the exergy destruction in solar still is highly influenced by low ambient temperatures and in future, effective design optimization studies can be carried out to gain the benefits through minimized energy/exergy losses.