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?

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    72·
    23 hours ago

    I run Nix on my primary box and my travel laptop. I was intimately familiar with Linux before my first NixOS install.

    You’ll get the primary install up pretty quickly. If you have trouble with the nix.configuration, 9 out of 10 times chatGPT can can get you more or less what you’re looking for in documentation. It’s probably the single shining positive use of LLMs.

    Adding things to the config once you know what you’re trying to add and where you’re trying to add it is not difficult at all. Sometimes documentation will tell you to use certain commands that don’t seem to be available It’s usually that you’re missing a include which are somewhat cagey.

    All that said, other than partial immutability, I don’t know that you’re going to reap any true benefit from nix other than the challenge. It’s a nas, so you’re not going to be moving it between different hardware. The data itself isn’t immutable or protected or backed up in any way specific. I fear you’d just be fighting nix to support, manage and maintain RAID or ZFS.

    Another pretty serious complication that Nix throws at you is major updates. Individual nix channel and home manager rebuilds aren’t too bad, But when you need to run that 25.11 update You’ve got a pretty good chance at breaking your system. And it’s not like they continue to run the older updates forever, they EOL those previous versions pretty quickly. That’s actually one of the things keeping me from running it on more serverses they lack of a true LTS. A new major stable comes out every 6 months and you have one month after it comes out before the old version is EOL

    For my laptop and desktop that’s no big deal. But not so much for servers that I don’t want to dick with all the time.