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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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.
I think it’s neat. It has tons guides and plugins to do pretty much anything. Other solutions can be lacking in documentation. One big plus is the way you can just throw in whatever drives you’ve got laying around and not have to worry about them matching or anything. Is it the best performing? Probably not but it doesn’t need to be. For me it just hosts files and a bunch of fairly lightweight services.
I think because it’s got a black background in the UI and it makes people feel like hackers. OpenMediaVault’s choice of white and light blue is way less 1337.
OMV has dark mode.
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
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.
I picked unRAID to be able to mix disk sizes. It also requires little maintenance in my experience, so that’s also a plus.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If I’ve learned anything in the 30 odd years homelabing and running a SaaS application, it’s that you need to learn the basics of the command line. That will help you master running anything on a nix server.
But must new homelabers are only able to use a gui, so unraid is the best way to get into running stuff with the least effort.
I keep thinking a homelab 101 course would help those new to homelabing get going without a gui.
Oh hi I picked up Linux for the CLI and shell and the UI for me has nothing to do with it.
There is no easy way to break into the scene and unraid is a one stop shop. So you want to set up a few little projects on your own? It’s learning containerization, learning networking and NAT, figuring out filesystems (and shares and share locations) and backup strategies, how to integrate with VPN, deployment strategies and templates (think Ansible, docker compose, make scripts, etc). There’s a shitload to know and not a “for dummies” place to learn it.
Taking the “easy” first project of ARR suite + jackett, integrate with transmission, and integrate with jellyfin or Plex. This is not a couple hours of work if you’ve never done it before. With unraid it’s probably one video tutorial and less than an hour? Idk I haven’t done that one yet. But it’s a common request.
There are a lot of things that need to hang together for a good homelab to work, and unraid for me has made it so I don’t have to spend all my time doing plumbing and background work to try a project and see if I even want to use it.
I would absolutely do a 101 on self hosting, but it seems everybody has different priorities on what to host and how so it’s probably not cut and dry to implement.
The course would be more of a ‘how do you use the terminal and where to find help’
As a lot of the requests I see are the result of not having good experience on the command line, once you can use a terminal the world is yours to command
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.
Decent UI. Affordable lifetime pricing. Actually just-works. No retrospective enshittification. Free tier is actually free, not ad supported.
You get what you pay for, and you’re not the product.
Free Tier? You mean the 30 day trial?
I genuinely thought it’s not limited, but yes, the trial.
*No retrospective enshittification yet
Its not yours they can at any time choose to do so
But they haven’t so far, and the question was why it’s popular at this moment.
Possible future enshittification disqualifies all software, unless you prevent it from going online - which you can also do with 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.
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.
They have (had?) a fairly generous free tier that works well for people starting out.
I ended up buying a license after evaluation because the UI provides everything I reasonably want to do, it’s fundamentally a Linux server so I can change things I need, and it requires virtually zero fucking around to get started and keep running.
I guess the short answer is: it ticks a lot of boxes.
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.
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?
