I think most selfhosters already know/use Linux, so management issues are already known. About the ease of use, if you manage services with docker it's really easy to bring them up/down, and if you want some GUI there's portainer.
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
32 points (75.8% liked)
Selfhosted
51865 readers
588 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
zfs has been working nicely for me for many years, for diverse operating systems including zfs all-in-one for internal NFS mount.
Already bought the lifetime license. It's great, I don't miss rolling my own bare metal arch servers.
(Because I still do that too)
Edit:
Unraid is stupidly point and shoot. It just works for whatever weird configuration of hardware you have and the provisioning is extremely intuitive, fast, and it just fucking works. Why yes, I will have a paperless server and have it auto update and sure here let's make this space a samba drive to receive docs. Paperless is not brain surgery in arch, but man 5 minute setup for stuff is nice. Ive got maybe 10 containers running that I set up the first time I launched Unraid more than a year ago and I otherwise haven't touched it. The upside and downside is that I didn't have to learn anything to do it. Esp if you get your stuff from the same maker/provider the latest versions all hang together and updating can just be automated.
load more comments
(4 replies)
I bout unraid years ago.. Mostly because I was just married and just started my career and wanted a solution that was already baked. It's been great. I think it's helped me get to under stand docker more. I'd often want to run a docker that's not in their app store (yet).
The problem I kept running into is I wanted go check out and do everything which often broke things or something weird would happen.. Lol. So I have two know. One that's "production" and another for checking things out.
Ha nice. I actually like it when things break and I manage to fix them. That's how you learn and finding the solution is satisfying.
For me I need to have stuff I actually use break to have the motivation to figure it out
When remodelling my NAS I was tempted to go for unraid as well, but in the end I chose OMV. Aside from some minor problems here and there it has been running great.
Fair warning unraid is slow... A friend tried unraid and absolutley hated it because file transfer was verry slow in comparison to both arch and windows.
I've never tried Arch but my debian server with kvm/qemu/cockpit running mdraid1 and smb/nfs file sharing - works well enough and I enjoy the tinkering and setting it all up. I'm writing this from a virtual Fedora KDE workstation that I've setup vfio and pcie passthrough of my dgpu and a usb controller on (both connected to my monitor that acts as a usb hub).
A friend runs a Proxmox VE Community Edition with physical disk passthrough to a virtual Nextcloud server and that seems to work well too.
I guess my answer is no, I don't look at UnRAID and think "fuck this shit I'm done", I enjoy the tinkering that makes you frustrated.
May I ask what kind of brick walls you're hitting and what software you run on Arch that makes it so frustrating?
I actually gave Debian a go and I get the hype. Compared to Arch its a dream to set up and work with. Somewhere down the road I might go back to it.
Proxmox - it looks great but I think its overkill for what I need. I can run most things in Docker - I don't really need virtualization. At some point in the future I'd like to try it and have TrueNAS virtualized on top to manage the NAS side of things.
There's not really particular thing (or things) that are insurmountable/unbearable with Arch. Its more the experience. But I love it and hate it in equal measure ha.
What I like about running a hypervisor and true vms is that I can fool around with some vms in my server without risk of disrupting the others.
I run most of my dockers in one VM, my game servers in another and the Jellyfin instance on a third. That allows me to fool around with my portainer instance or game servers without disrupting Jellyfin and so on.
Part of it is that I'm more used to and comfortable in managing vms and their backup/recovery compared to LXCs and Dockers.
Im running a similar setup (ZFS pool, Cockpit, portainer x2, and a few LXCs for Plex, Frigate, etc) and it's been great. Before building it early this year, I'd been running everything on Windows for the decade prior because I was unfamiliar with Linux and struggled like OP when problems arose, but after following a guide to get everything setup it's been rock solid and if I screw anything up I can just load a backup. I'd also looked into TrueNAS and Unraid but this gives me a more flexible setup without any extra cost and the ability to tinker without affecting anything else like you said.
Why not something like NAS4Free or OpenMediaVault, then? You don't have to chose between DIY and paid-for, there is a middle-ground
Experimented with various approaches, looking to replace an older Pegasus set of 6 drives and a file server.
Unraid just worked. Lots of support and tutorials to get started. Look up Spaceinvader on YouTube as a starter
I have a working solution already so unraid isn't really appealing to me, and as you say, isn't FOSS. It's one of the multiple reasons I'll never switch to Plex, even if some argue it is a superior product to Jellyfin.
But I use NixOS (btw) so it's fairly low maintenance once it's setup, and easy to redeploy if things ever go completely sideways due to hardware failures etc
I actually bought unraid before it became a subscription. And I must say, i really like it.
I am currently looking into Proxmox to build a small cluster to prevent critical services from becoming unavailable whenever I do stupid things… but… compared to unraid the learning curve and ease of use is much more brutal.
@jobbies Eh? Just use Fedora/Alma/Rocky with BTRFS and Samba/NFS. You can even use an immutable flavour and not have to worry about updates breaking anything.
@jobbies Eh?
That's ma name don't wear it out
I think if I'd known more about BTRFS before I started I might have chosen it over ZFS. Shoulda woulda coulda...
I don't use unraid I use XCP-ng instead.
Never heard of this...
Because it's a hypervisor, not a NAS.
TrueNAS