Currently working on an Arch server for my self hosting needs. I love arch, in my eyes its the perfect platform for self hosting. There is no bloat, making it lightweight and resource efficient. Its also very stable if you go down the lts route and have the time and skills to head off problems before they become catastrophic.
The downsides. For someone who is a semi-noob there is a very steep learning curve. Arch is very well documented but when you hit a problem or a brick wall its very frustrating. My low tolerence for bullshit means I take hours/days long breaks from it. There’s also time demands in the real world so needless to say I’ve been going at it for a few weeks now.
Unraid is very appealing - nice clean interface, out-of-the-box solutions for whatever you want to do, easy NAS management… What’s not to like? If it was fully open-source I would’ve bought into it from the start. At least once a day I think “I’m done. Sign me up unraid”. Its taking an age to set up the Arch server. If I went for unraid I could be self hosting in a matter of hours. Unraid is the antitheses of Arch. Arch is for masochists.
Do you ever look at products like unraid and think “fuck this shit, gimme some of that”? What is your version of this? Have you ever actually done it and regretted it/lived happily ever after?
TrueNAS was actually the first thing I tried. The NAS side of it is great but my need to tinker and get my hands dirty got the better of me. And I don’t actually mind paying for good software, its the fact that so much of unraid is closed-source puts me off.
Are you using truenas as the entire homelab?
I also love messing with stuff until it breaks and I learn something, but I’ve decided I just want my files to be accessible.
So I actually have truenas virtualized with a passed through HBA so I can run proxmox to host all my breakable VMs while leaving truenas alone.