On the WAN show, Linus has mentioned multiple times that he’s an investor in a NAS OS startup, but hasn’t released many details since it’s in development. Have they reached out to any additional YouTubers/community members who focus more directly on servers/would be able to evaluate the software quality?
They announced it on wan show. Link + time-stamped from source
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New update from this week’s wan show
HexOS beta planned for Q3 2024
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so clicking through and reading that a bit, it’s just a “simple” front end for truenas that run on their servers, and though not announced all indications are it will be subscription based with a mondo priced perpetual license option.
color me unimpressed. I haven’t yet actually installed truenas, but reading up on it in their guides it really doesn’t look that complicated. Sure it CAN get complicated, but that thread implies you would need to switch back to truenas native UI to do that kind of stuff anyway.
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It’s extremely easy to install, a bit more difficult to understand how to configure. For a novice is a total nightmare, if you want to do things right from the start. If you have some Linix basis is a lot easier to get into it.
I’m sure this frontend doesn’t fix the issues TrueNAS has always had and are being/will be addressed.
We’ll see when it comes out.
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TrueNAS is usually easy to install. There are playbooks for it.
I’m not sure I’d want to install something backed my LTT. I remember their stance on warranties for physical products. I can’t imagine they are keen to offer robust support for software.
Of course, it may be that this is intended for some very narrow use-case with specific (branded?) hardware.
I can see it having value for users not interested/not capable/too busy to sort out the options of TrueNAS. I’m just not one of them.
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I wasn’t going to get into my personal opinions on linus, but in short yeah I don’t want to support something he’s attached to, so agreed there. However, with that said, if you trust what he’s said publicly about this project, he just gave them some VC startup money and otherwise isn’t involved. I wouldn’t necessarily be concerned from THAT particular angle.
A simple example of this is our setup wizard. While we let you do this and queue all that work behind the scenes, it’s very important that when we provision the server, we first create the storage pools, then the folders, then the users, and then apply the permissions.
-(from their blog post)
This is insane. Instead of just making some software that makes things easy to understand, they provision things for you (maybe not even using a real person, but some cloud bullshit running on their own server … or ever worse, maybe it’s A.I! 
)
The post talks about queuing up changes, which makes me think ever change has to go to them and back down to your box! It’s amazing how they made something that take the problem with cloud providers to new insane levels! They’re literally (or probably; no prices yet) going to charge a service fee for managing your own hardware!
In an emergency, local admin access is always available through the TrueNAS UI and CLI.
(╯’ ')╯︵ ┻━┻
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Of course the standard for this is would you tell a family member or friend to get this instead of a Netflix subscription, so you don’t have to do tech support. I wished that through their new user funding source they could develop new features such as officially supported luks encryption etc, and maybe it’ll get there, but it definitely doesn’t look like that so far.
“We liked Plex’s model”, that’s where I stopped listening to. He could’ve referred to Syncthing or any other actually good self hosted solution that doesn’t require you to pay monthly for shit you own. And letting them handling security exposing A WHOLE ASS NAS APPLIANCE to the internet is just asking for troubles. Installing TrueNAS is easy enough but can be scary for people used to just click “next” a bunch of times. I don’t know what this software is aimed to, makes no sense and it’s dangerous.
The TrueNAS UI is nothing to write home about, but it’s not terrible either. What they need to work on are the descriptions of what some things do. Other than that I think it’s fine for what it needs to do.
A newbie is also not gonna put together it’s own NAS, go through that effort and never bother with configuring it and figure out how to get it do to what they want.
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Yeah why would I want to pay for just a front end on free software. Most users don’t change a lot so one basic set up would last a super long time. Sure LTT loyalists will hand over money, so they will profit for sure.
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HexOS sounds like a bad idea to me. The problems with TrueNAS are not with the web GUI nor setup, its all that dumb docker stuff that doesn’t work. When used as intended; a storage appliance it works damn rock solid.
I have not looked into if this will be paid but if so then this sounds painful.
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Since my last post, I now HAVE installed Truenas. Was it completely smooth sailing, no. But nothing I encountered problem wise would have been improved by a different UI doing it. For that matter, can this thing actually even do the install for you? I don’t see how it would. I also can’t see a different UI helping for the configuration any more than just following the install guide on the truenas website, which is what I did. And that was free.
Side comment, I can see a holy war happening since TrueNAS people are hella stubborn in their ways.
They seem to have walked back some of the “way too online” stuff, but you still need to do the install itself online. Idk what they were thinking there.
I get that homelab isn’t exactly their target audience, but you figure they would at least get a little bit of input from homelab youtubers. It’s kind of insane that they all found out about it when we did. Running this past anyone but Linus likely would have gotten a better result. That said, I’m surprised it did get past him since he’s always been a local-only diehard for his own home.
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FWIW, Linus has claimed he’s had no involvement other than throwing money at them and a feature request or two.
And obviously promoting it. I’m sure it will get its own dedicated video when it launches. Probably followed by some complaining on wan show about how any comments criticizing it aren’t fair and “you’re just objectively wrong”.
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It would be strange to buy into it w/o know at least a little of its online nature, but it’s def much worse if he didn’t even know that much. Then again, knowing how he feels about Plex, if he did hear any of that he probably would have walked away himself lol.
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Real talk did LMG invest or did Linus himself invest in them?