I just cant get it. reloaded trunas already once. I get these error files when loading apps. Cant delete these read only files. Coming from being trained to be a dummy from windows doing everything for me is hard to start having to be like back in school and learning from scratch. finding answers involves looking at tons of info not related is tough on my time. Dumping it now and moving on. And these are the apps approved that caused this. I thought trying to reload them would fix the file but it just brings up the file that is read only, cant change it or delete with my windows knoledge.Goodbye
So you joined just to tell us you’re leaving? Don’t let the door hit you, I guess.
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Does TrueNAS have a steep learning curve? Absolutely.
At the same time, the documentation has improved dramatically - both inside the application as well as online.
But as ixsystems has upped their game, newcomers expectations have also. “It should be easy just like Techno Tim showed me in the video”, etc… except, techno Tim may be showing off something that works well in TrueNAS 24.04 and you’re on 25.10 and much of the infrastructure around the VM you’re trying to build has changed in the meantime.
…and that reality (ie having to stay up to date on all things VM, jailmaker, Apps, etc if you want to use them and maintain a current system) may also explain why so many people prefer using online services for tasks that likely could be done better in-house if the user was willing to put in some time.
We’re all busy. Relearning things that used to be easy have often become harder to do thanks to crummy UI choices (MacOS, excel, etc) that a designer deigned aesthetically essential, even though they break 50 years of UI research.
It’s frustrating, I get it. And I cannot thank all the Demi-gods that roam the halls here for their help getting my TrueNAS set up and running as well as it does. Where I can, I try to give back also.
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it can be frustrating - truenas in particular can be challenging for someone to get up and going.
a couple suggestions if it is not too late for you:
- try other NAS systems. my favorite now is fnOS (FeiNiu OS), and before that OpenMediaVault is also quite good. fnOS in particular is very easy to get up and going. Very “Windowsy”.
- try use samba directly: getting samba up and running on a linux, either directly or via a container, is very easy if you have working knowledge of linux.
This is also a very friendly community so if you run into issues, post your questions and you will likely get it resolved soon.
In general, I don’t think TrueNAS or ZFS are suitable for casual or less skilled computer users. With iX being focused on Enterprise products, the usability for casual, less skilled users is not a priority.
To be clear, it is up to the user to determine if they want to learn ZFS, and TrueNAS. Some users never want to touch Unix command line, nor deal with the underlying file system, (ZFS in this case). For those users it may make sense to skip ZFS & TrueNAS.
I still remember the way to eject floppies on a Mac, was to drag the floppy icon to the trash icon. That is absolutely not intuitive and never something I would have thought of myself. In fact, I would have assumed it would format the floppy, or perhaps erase all the files. (This was of course before Google…)
Back to the original’s comments. Perhaps the OP would have been better served with HexOS.
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Instead of creating a forum account after the frustration to let us all know you’ve decided to scrap TrueNAS, perhaps it would have been wiser to create it once you hit a roadblock and ask someone for help.
We don’t bite, and often times failure is the quickest way to learn something new 
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i can understand his frustration: some people want turnkey solutions and truenas isn’t exactly that.
but other alternatives - i mentioned some - can be tried.
I was thinking that the OP should have tried something along the lines of Synology or Qnap if they didn’t want to learn a bit about system configuration. 
All the best,
Bill
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i just looked up hexos and thought it was interesting.
good that it offers another option for beginners but not sure if the business proposition is sufficiently present to make it a successful business.
being in the NAS business is challenging as 1) the home lab market is tiny; and 2) it is difficult to add value as the basic construct is free and well known.
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Yeah, and Open Media Vault or whatever it’s called is also increasing it’s prosumer footprint by making ZFS an optional add-on. So people who got into OMV can now get the benefit of ZFS without the learning curve of TrueNAS - which only works to a point of course as TrueNAS offers far more than what OMV can offer.
But, if storing a few tunes, movies, and files is all you’re after, OMV now offers a lot more re: data integrity than it used to. HexOS seems like an attempt to recreate the simpler UI of competing prosumer systems (i.e. ReadyNAS, Synology, and QNAP) while runing on a far wider scope of hardware platforms (like OMV already does).
Unless they’ve seriously stepped up their game in the last couple of months, ZFS is very much a second-class citizen in OMV. One major omission is any kind of pool management after creating the pool–replacing disks, adding vdevs, etc., are completely absent from the OMV GUI.
For a F/OSS ZFS NAS OS, the options very very slim:
- TrueNAS, obviously
- Including HexOS
- and zVault, if it ever really gets off the ground
- napp-it
- OMV is at best halfway there
- Or roll your own on top of Linux, FreeBSD, or whatever Solarish OS you like
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It’s a dead project. We’re only a few months away from FreeBSD 13 becoming EOL, while FreeBSD 15.0 has already been out. The zVault devs seemed too focused on creating a 13.5-based release, which is pointless.
A Core user, if they’re willing to get their hands dirty, might as well install Syvle on a vanilla FreeBSD 15 system, and then just update it regularly like they would any distro or upstream software. They would need to copy their settings into respective config files on the server. (SMB, NFS, UPS…)
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I suspect as much, but I haven’t followed it that closely.
And, of course, the “roll your own” option doesn’t mean you’re stuck doing everything at the shell. Webmin and Cockpit (among probably others) give some measure of a GUI in Linux; looks like Sylve does something similar under BSD. But there are very few real options for a ZFS-based NAS OS.
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There is also Houston Command Center from 45Drives, which is built on Cockpit and is thus somewhat OS agnostic (as long as you’re using Linux). I think it’s less opinionated than TrueNAS, but in some respects it’s also less polished. If TrueNAS is challenging for someone, Houston might be more so.
I’d use Ansible to template and deploy a OpenZFS+Samba-on-Debian stack if I wasn’t using TrueNAS. I really like TrueNAS, personally. I can see how it’s not for everyone.
Not everyone wants to become an expert to use storage, but speaking for myself TrueNAS introduced me to and made it easy for me to fall in love with ZFS.
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If installing ZFS on OMV goes through similar hoops and loops as installing docker, the learning curve is steeper than that of TrueNAS, IMHO…
And then comes pool management by CLI.
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Try ZimaOS its a great middle ground…
ZimaOS and fnOS (and many others, like OMV) are quite similar in that they are trying to be all-in-one. so they are essentially PVE with a built-in NAS server.
they are all much easier to set up than TrueNAS, going back the OP’s difficulties with setting up TrueNAS.
I would also encourage people to just set up Samba (as an app or a container): if all you need is filesharing, that’s actually a much easier route.