It’s proprietary, after all. I understand paid is fine, but even then, it usually better be open source.
So, why is Unraid an exception ?
Thanks
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You’ve mistakenly conflated the Self Hosted community with the FOSS community. There is a lot of overlap in interests between the two, but the venn diagram of those communities are not at all a circle.
It’s a similar thing with the SH community and HomeLabbing. All home labs are selfhosted obviously, but not every stack of hardware hosting things would be considered a “home lab”.
This was my mistake when I started self hosting a few years ago!
I went all-in on FOSS. And my God, it was constantly a maintenance nightmare for some apps. Some would break with updates. Some times I felt I was playing wackamole replacing one set of problems with new ones.
Then I met a swlf-hoster who has been doing self hosting for two decades and he helped he unfuck my stuff by recommending commercial and paid services. And honestly, it was awesome because I’m too old for this shit. I just want working services.
They had the right product at the right time. No other free or paid alternative was that user friendly in allowing laymen in mixing and matching multiple disks and having redundancy
Doing that with pure Linux command line at the time it was inconceivable for 99% of users (at most a raid1 with mdadm over two drives could be easily attained) and windows home server initially was an alternative but Microsoft was completely misguided and “improvements” in Windows home server 2 completely killed it
Then they added docker support and it was even easier to self host everything.
But if they tried to launch today, with how mature are free alternatives, they would never reach critical mass adoption to be sustainable.
For example, I don’t think that the paid fork of truenas that LTT has economically backed is going to be successful
For example, I don’t think that the paid fork of truenas that LTT has economically backed is going to be successful
Maybe not in the short term.
But he mentions them on every ocassion they’d use TrueNAS that doesnt require advanced configuration.And it really is just a pretty frontend with some additional features.
So I don’t see why it can’t be successful (except for too high prices)As an user that paid for windows home server, why windows home server 2(011) was a complete failure
- Updating to whs2 required a full wipe - unacceptable by everyone
- Updating to whs2 required to pay full price and not upgrade price - lol
- The system drive wasn’t covered by redundancy and you would lose all the settings if the drive died
- The data drives also couldn’t get any kind of redundancy as they REMOVED the feature from the server and moved it to clients! What the fuck? It was the main selling point! Easy raid for everyone. What’s the purpose of the “home server” if it couldn’t pool drives, while the clients with Windows 8 home instead could set a massive, redundant, pool of 10 drives???
- They removed the useful feature that backed up automatically all the windows computers in the network
- They removed the basic features like the media gallery and such, to see that you would need windows media center… but 6 years after they killed windows media center
It’s less hassle than maintaining my homelab was when I used Ubuntu server. Just because I can do it the “hard way”, doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy easy mode and not having to do much of anything.
They give you exactly what they promise with zero enshitification. It’s a solid product and was worth it to me to buy, just for the convenience.
I get that. But at the same time, when shit does go wrong, it’s so much harder to work around their whole system when it’s so unfamiliar. I’m not speaking from experience with unraid. Just other NAS solutions (TrueNAS) and other “easy mode” options from other tech. I almost always end up tossing it out for the less hand-holing option. Because then I have to understand it, and if I understand it, it becomes so much easier.
I’ve never once had anything go wrong with Unraid. But even if I did, it’s pretty painless to restore a backup since the OS is on a USB drive and isn’t very big.
Because it is beginner friendly and it has a lifetime license I guess and it is not yet enshittified.
Some don’t care much about the license. Like how many people run Xpenology (hacked synology dsm) or Plex or stuff like that.
Unraid is easy to start with when you have no idea what you’re doing. Other stuff often requires more up front work to setup.
The paid licence is just the cost of the conveniences.
Is it much easier than TrueNAS?
I went with TrueNAS because it’s open-source, and it’s been smooth sailing.
(I just use it as a NAS, nothing more)
I’ve tried both Unraid and TrueNAS. While I greatly prefer TrueNAS, Unraid is much easier to set up and get going for beginners. It’s been a while since I’ve set up TrueNAS from scratch, but last I tried, it wasn’t a very beginner friendly experience. If you weren’t already familiar with ZFS, you were in for a pretty difficult time.
UnRAID is also great when you know exactly what you’re doing but you do this stuff for work every day and your home stuff you want to be easy and out of the box lol.
My only regret is that I have only one upvote to give this post.
Just because I have the skills to setup a cluster of mini-pcs doesn’t mean I want to spend my one-precious-fucking-spare-hour a day making the thing work.
See also: a builder’s house, a mechanic’s car etc
Same, I’m a Linux user since redhat 5 and more than capable of running all the unraid features on a regular Linux distro or proxmox, truenas, whatever … I just don’t want to, I want flexible disk sizes and a bunch of docker containers, that’s it. Unraid offers that in a great package.
If I had to guess, never having used it myself, is that it has a decent UI that simplifies sometimes complicated operations and it has been around seemingly forever.
Proprietary doesn’t necessarily have to be bad, obviously this will vary from person to person and who you ask. Personally Ive listened to enough podcasts with Unraid folks in them and read articles etc to be able base my trust in them and what they do.
Except you kinda get crucified for not using (F)OSS on lemmy^(exceptions apply)
Exceptions I encountered:
- Apple (to some degree)
- Plex
- Unraid
Since you mentioned Plex, HAVE YOU HEARD OF JELLYFIN?
/s
Yep.
And they released today the new version 10.11.0 with massive improvements (according to the changelog/blog) to the server.Make sure to try it ;)
Still got those gaping security holes that mean you should never expose it to the internet?
It is? Where? Please don’t say Reddit as that is full of advertisement bots pretending to be regular users.
I am more surprised by how popular Proxmox seems to be here, which is really just adding a lot of unnecessary complexity, but I guess the GUI comments others here shared applies to it as well.
In this very community, I’ve seen plenty of Unraid posts, as much as I do on Reddit.
UnRAID is very popular in the general self hosting community.
I am more surprised by how popular Proxmox seems to be here, which is really just adding a lot of unnecessary complexity
I switched to Proxmox for one reason: PBS. As far as I know there is no match with plain KVM. Proxmox also makes setting up and maintaining a high-availability setup very easy, which is a nice bonus.
For me, it was initially a jumping off point because I was more comfortable with GUIs. Now it’s a matter of convenience. I’m much better than I was with CLI, docker, etc, but I find unraid makes management easier. Proprietary doesn’t necessarily equal bad. Since it’s built on top of open source, you can pivot if they start pulling stupid shit.
Even in the open source community, the libre-ness of a product is just one of many factors. The fitness for a purpose, the initial difficulty of the setup, the continuous difficulty of operation and maintenance, the pace of development (if applicable), the professional or community support structure, the projected longevity of the product or service, and the general insanity of the people involved are all important factors that can, and often do outweigh the importance of open software.
Off-topic, but if you want a competent Unraid alternative, then try Proxmox.
Which is still not nearly as userfriendly as unraid.
With unraid I can browse the community store, click install and with juste one additional click I most of the time have this service fully running. It notifies me if there is an update and I can install updates with a single click.
With proxmox, I have yet to figure out how to update the installed services without manually ssh-ing in every single container and run a specific update command.
Unraid is light years ahead in terms of userfriendly ux for novice users.
I use Ranchers store for that reason. Update the chart and the whole service updates.
Just wish they had a homesteader (this is what would call it) kind of chart catalog that had some some good defaults for homelab use. You know assume longhorn CSI, 1 to 12 node clusters, small users (1 to 20) base, etc. Pack depencies from other charts in the catalog (if you need one postgress db, reuse as much of that deployment for the next app that needs it, etc).
You CAN do all of that now, but each app isn’t really aware of each other, and you have to set the configs for your actual lab.
I am a hesitating running a VM in proxmox to run my docker services there. It doesn’t feel right to me (maybe I am wrong, what do I know…).
I also do not understand yet how this would work in a cluster. I don’t want all the services bundled on one node (then the whole cluster thing would have been a pointless exercise haha)
Arent they different solutions that also offer overlapping features (e.g. VMs and Containerization).
I would rather compare Proxmox with Hyper-V than Unraid.
For me, it was the parity system and the fact that i could mix different disk sizes and the vm + graphic card pass-through setup. Unraid helped me to start in this world.
Years later, after gaining experience on all of that and investing in dedicated pcie card and disks, I’ve moved to truenas my data and containers.
Still using unraid for the vm part. But i plan to migrate to truenas too at some point.
Has a nice UI, let’s me mix and match disks, let’s me host docker containers plus a VM with gpu pass through.
All basically out of the box. (Ok - Pass through was a bastard) All for a one off price.
I don’t know if there are other options that let me do all of that, unraid has always been the one mentioned.
Mixing disks is the #1 reason I went with unraid over any other option.
Zfs and truenas core do this fine
Please elaborate. I have only found that all drives will be treated as they would have the smallest capacity in the bunch.
There is some manual workarounds, which is would not call „can do it fine“
Or am I missing something?
To note, unless you buy the most expensive tier it’s no longer a one time purchase.
Yep they changed this somewhat recently I believe? Like a year or two back, not sure - before my time.
Last I checked I think it’s now like $50 or $60 for the first year, and renewals are half that, so definitely not terrible.
Yeah in the past year or so. I grandfathered in before they raised the price of that highest tier so I like to be sure people are aware. I’m a big fan and I think it’s worth the price.
Good point. I got 1 year of ultimate, with the plan to upgrade to perpetual if it was good (it is!).
The cost of that is still less than the cost would have been to buy new matching drives.
It’s still a one time purchase for the license. It’s only OS updates that would need to be paid for yearly after the 1st year
Pass through is always a bastard.
I’ve always found it helpful to use the time stone and tell “IOMMU I’ve come to bargain” until it works.
It just needed the AMD compatibility plugin, lots of time wasted until someone pointed that out though.
I just tinkered a bit with zimaos and I was pretty impressed. if it keeps getting updated I can see unraid getting a serious competitor. but yes the question still stands why there isn’t something similar beginner friendly in the opensource space.
