I was not interested in maintaining an extensive homelab (so that I have separate storage and computing nodes), or buying into a new "software ecosystem" (I would consider buying e.g. a Synology/QNAP box if I did), so I ended up with vanilla Debian. Debian 13 (trixie) got released right on time, so I will be on the latest for a couple of years.
From what I tried (TrueNAS, OpenMV, Unraid), Unraid seemed to be the most appealing. TrueNAS was very unfriendly towards even the idea of opening a shell [1] and IIRC you couldn't even install debian packages out of the box. OpenMV had problems booting on my hardware, plus it is lagging behind mainline debian (the Debian 12 version of OpenMV got released around 2 months before Debian 13).
Unraid also had limitations regarding what you could run, but the community seemed to be the most robust. Also, it is the only one that stores its parity data externally. This gives you the most flexibility with disk configurations. Also, IIRC you can pull out a disk and the data on it would be readable, so migrating your data to something else would be relatively painless.
So, if I had to choose a NAS OS, it would probably be Unraid. The downside is that you need to buy a license. But hey! Black Friday to the rescue!
alt Hacker News
Not really.
I was not interested in maintaining an extensive homelab (so that I have separate storage and computing nodes), or buying into a new "software ecosystem" (I would consider buying e.g. a Synology/QNAP box if I did), so I ended up with vanilla Debian. Debian 13 (trixie) got released right on time, so I will be on the latest for a couple of years.
From what I tried (TrueNAS, OpenMV, Unraid), Unraid seemed to be the most appealing. TrueNAS was very unfriendly towards even the idea of opening a shell [1] and IIRC you couldn't even install debian packages out of the box. OpenMV had problems booting on my hardware, plus it is lagging behind mainline debian (the Debian 12 version of OpenMV got released around 2 months before Debian 13).
Unraid also had limitations regarding what you could run, but the community seemed to be the most robust. Also, it is the only one that stores its parity data externally. This gives you the most flexibility with disk configurations. Also, IIRC you can pull out a disk and the data on it would be readable, so migrating your data to something else would be relatively painless.
So, if I had to choose a NAS OS, it would probably be Unraid. The downside is that you need to buy a license. But hey! Black Friday to the rescue!
[1] https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/scaletutorials/systemsett...