Submitted 1 day ago by KaKi87@jlai.lu to selfhosted@lemmy.world
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
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.
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 local 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.
Decent UI Affordable lifetime pricing Actually just-works No retrospective enshittification Free tier is actually free, not ad supported
Of course any of these arguments my change in the future. Then I will reevaluate my opinion.
Free Tier? You mean the 30 day trial?
I genuinely thought it’s not limited, but yes, the trial.
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:
Since you mentioned Plex, HAVE YOU HEARD OF JELLYFIN?
/s
I’ve never heard of it, but because it’s proprietary I assume useful idiots who don’t know any better use it just to fit in with each other.
I see it a lot these days.
Off-topic, but if you want a competent Unraid alternative, then try Proxmox.
Arent they different solutions that also offer overlapping features (e.g. VMs and Containerization).
I would rather compare Proxmox with Hyper-V than Unraid.
Which is still not nearly as userfriendly as unraid.
With unraid I can browse the community store, click install and with juste one additional click I most of the time have this service fully running. It notifies me if there is an update and I can install updates with a single click.
With proxmox, I have yet to figure out how to update the installed services without manually ssh-ing in every single container and run a specific update command.
Unraid is light years ahead in terms of userfriendly ux for novice users.
It’s less hassle than maintaining my homelab was when I used Ubuntu server. Just because I can do it the “hard way”, doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy easy mode and not having to do much of anything.
They give you exactly what they promise with zero enshitification. It’s a solid product and was worth it to me to buy, just for the convenience.
I get that. But at the same time, when shit does go wrong, it’s so much harder to work around their whole system when it’s so unfamiliar. I’m not speaking from experience with unraid. Just other NAS solutions (TrueNAS) and other “easy mode” options from other tech. I almost always end up tossing it out for the less hand-holing option. Because then I have to understand it, and if I understand it, it becomes so much easier.
I’ve never once had anything go wrong with Unraid. But even if I did, it’s pretty painless to restore a backup since the OS is on a USB drive and isn’t very big.
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.
Mixing disks is the #1 reason I went with unraid over any other option.
Zfs and truenas core do this fine
To note, unless you buy the most expensive tier it’s no longer a one time purchase.
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
Good point. I got 1 year of ultimate, will the plan to upgrade to perpetual if it was good (it is!)
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.
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.
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 picked unRAID to be able to mix disk sizes. It also requires little maintenance in my experience, so that’s also a plus.
Because it’s easy and does all the hard stuff out of the box? Also any sized drives!
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.
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.
Some don’t care much about the license. Like how many people run Xpenology (hacked synology dsm) or Plex or stuff like that.
The big thing is very easily mix and match different sizes of disks. ZFS as of recently can sort of do that, but its not as efficient.
Can 100% do this. Not just kinda. Works fine.
Can it access a file without spinning up all disks in the array?
I haven’t used ZFS in like a decade, but would strongly consider going back to it if it can do that now.
Mergerfs can do that too and you can keep the underlying fs as whatever you want.
Yes, but it does not have redundancy or caching. Redundancy can be achieved with snapraid, but how you get caching I don’t know…
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.
I know, I use myself, I was just poking fun. Lemmy’s became so fucking unfunny lately.
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.
If I had to guess, never having used it myself, is that it has a decent UI that simplifies sometimes complicated operations and it has been around seemingly forever.
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.
Because it is beginner friendly and it has a lifetime license I guess.
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.
UnRAID is very popular in the general self hosting community.
In this very community, I’ve seen plenty of Unraid posts, as much as I do on Reddit.
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.
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.
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 hours ago
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)
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
As an user that paid for windows home server, why windows home server 2(011) was a complete failure