I’m planning on, eventually, putting together a NAS for myself. I’ve basically narrowed down the selection to either trying NixOS or going for TrueNAS, however I can’t figure out how to decide between those two, as they are fundamentally quite different.

TrueNAS is a dedicated NAS OS so that’s obviously enticing for me, but I heard if you also want to do some server stuff like hosting some things and not just storing data it is subpar? I never got the information out of people what exactly is supposed to be subpar about it, but I’ve seen those complaints a handful of times.

Meanwhile NixOS is just a Linux distro. I’m familiar enough with Linux, although NixOS is its own beast and from what I heard its documentation isn’t quite what you’d get out of for instance the Arch Wiki, but it being declarative and easy to restore old versions in case something breaks allegedly makes it rock solid, so that also sounds interesting.

So, after thinking about those things, I was wondering if any of you who use either of them could share your experiences and what you like or dislike about either option?

  • ZummiGummi@lemmy.nzEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    TLDR; TrueNAS

    I run TrueNAS and am happy with it so far. Run a few containers/apps on the same hardware without any problems but haven’t tried virtual machines. TrueNAS uses ZFS for its file system, which is good for preventing silent data corruption, which I didn’t really believe in until I was sorting out some photos recently and noticed that some of them that I had copied from my old NAS were slightly corrupt, i.e. line through the photo and Immich refusing to import the photo.

    So if the apps you want to host are available as containers, then you will be ok. If you want to run virtual machines, then you can, it’s just not the primary use case, look into that a bit more.