This sounds like the punch line to a bad joke, but apparently the infamous Linus of Linus Tech Tips is sponsoring a NAS OS, and right on the home page, it’s “Powered by TrueNAS”:
Which is… odd, IMO.
More info:
3 Likes
I am a Youtube subscriber to both Linus and NASCompares channels, so I am familiar with both of these Youtubers.
TBH I find this a little weird. I would have thought that a $250k investment with ixSystems might have been a better way forward than starting a new NAS company - but maybe they approached iX and were rebuffed or maybe they never tried.
However IMO this is a nudge to ixSystems that they really need to give more weight to their free users and to simplifying the technology still further and not only to prioritise their paying customers.
That said we have seen this sort of thing before where one company attempts to build on top of Open Source technology from another company - and indeed quite close to home e.g. TrueCharts. Issues I foresee:
-
As far as I can tell from the limited information so far, HexOS is NOT a hard fork (i.e. built on a fixed snapshot of TrueNAS) but rather “built on top of it” i.e. as TrueNAS changes so will HexOS. This means that HexOS may need to rework their own code whenever the underlying TrueNAS code changes. And as we know, it seems to change a lot. K8s/K3s → Docker, Reporting etc.
-
They seem to be replacing the TrueNAS Middleware/UI with their own - which is sort of odd, because AFAIK TrueNAS SCALE is just Debian plus the Middleware/UI. So what benefit are they getting from building on top of TrueNAS?
I guess we need to wait and see…
5 Likes
I’ll “wait and see”. The marketing for it seems very “apps heavy”, whereas I view a NAS as primarily a storage solution, and everything else comes second (apps, VMs).
I have to hand it to them: the GUI looks sleek. Very clean and polished. (As a Core user, which still has bugs and quirks in the GUI that will never be fixed, it makes me jealous.)
3 Likes
Not BSD though…
1 Like
No; my topic title was a little clickbait-y. But it’s weird to me that two UnRAID devs would base their new, free, NAS OS on a completely different platform.
Can’t stand his on-screen persona of a complete blithering idiot who also happens to be hyperactive. I presume it’s largely an act, but that doesn’t make it easier to watch.
Maybe. But as discussed in this topic, that can be easier said than done, and often removes the ability to do useful things.
I guess. I’m not a fan of the color scheme, but it isn’t the worst thing ever.
But it’s interesting to me how prominently the TrueNAS trademark features.
5 Likes
I, Winnie Linnie, find it simply unacceptable that any user of this forum would use clickbait thread titles. 
4 Likes
6 Likes
I think standard FreeBSD is about as sleek as I’ve seen! -I.e. [~]
And the funny thing is, I’ve never once seen anyone complain about one (not one!) button that doesn’t work as intended. Amazing!
3 Likes
I feel like I am in an alternate universe! (Been re-watching Fringe… so perhaps I am too susceptible to odd thoughts today.) Also checked the date, not the first day of the fouth month, (aka April fools day).
The only real things that this HexOS gets from using a base point of TrueNAS, is the OpenZFS package and a known working kernel for that version of OpenZFS.
Without the middleware, as been mentioned in a previous response, TrueNAS SCALE is just Debian.
1 Like
There is a lot more to TrueNAS than just the middleware package: scale-build/conf/build.manifest at d552dc559d959defc40276a76aff9eff7193a112 · truenas/scale-build · GitHub
Interesting though.
-
It feels like a hard-fork because they obviously have to have apps figured out before release and they cannot wait for things/efforts/arguments/deals to settle on TrueNAS. Timing is too on-point to be a coincidence. They could however, have their own build manifest and replace the components they’d need for their UI and components or they could just be ripping the head off–or even tapping into–the TrueNAS UI.
-
It feels like a purchased OS. “Wizards”, “Guided access” and “One-click apps” they’re going after a market that will pay for ease.
This is so funny! The guy who lost TBs of data, because did not run scrubs, had no alert mail, and did not check the webGUI for months, had no backup, is now sponsoring a fork? 
I personally think that ZFS is the wrong file system for the target audience. Too many things that can go wrong if you know nothing about ZFS. Unraid is the better option for that audience.
Either way, I think this is great news! This will attract the people that are currently posting their low quality support posts here and on reddit…
6 Likes
Well… I am looking forward to read a gazillion cries of help on the HexOS forums because of data loss and corrupted pools.
A fancy GUI wont stop ppl from using unsuitable hardware and weird pool layouts.
3 Likes
Better there than here
1 Like
A fancy GUI will invite the very people who are inclined to use unsuitable hardware and make weird pool layouts. (“Hey! This is Linux, we can do whatever we want!”)
I feel there is an opportunity for a profitable sub-business here: Make popcorn buckets large enough to display the word “Schadenfreude” written in a very bold typeface.
1 Like
I’m surprised that people would describe TrueNAS SCALE as " just Debian plus the Middleware/UI" when it uses a modified kernel, has introduced NFSv4 style ACLs, brought a form of netif to linux, has boot environments, includes numerous bespoke SAMBA vfs object modules, a slew of ixsystem systemd units and much else.
Good luck to whatever Hex OS is supposed to be. I’m personally not a fan of SCALE, but maybe if I’m physically still around in a year’s time SCALE 24.10, or whatever, it may be in a form I’d use.
If anyone is going fork TrueNAS, a FreeBSD 14.1 based NAS is what I’d look out for.
2 Likes
There’s definitely interest surrounding this, but whether it’s enough to sustain such a project is another question. But I think that’d be going in the opposite direction from “Hex OS.”
2 Likes
I as well. I don’t wish it, but if that would be a fork, I’d do my best to lend a hand.
Thinking about this more, I have to agree with others that say HexOS is a prime candidate for poor pool designs. And using ZFS for casual and user friendliness, I think not.
Not that their are any other modern file system & RAID schemes out their. BTRFS has proven beyond any doubt that it will never be feature parity with OpenZFS. And then HammerFS is for practical purposes too new and a single OS file system.
We STILL get people blaming power losses for pool problems. ZFS was SPECIFICALLY designed to prevent that. Which means any power loss that results in pool corruption was really bad or poorly chosen hardware. Or a hardware RAID controller card, (that some think making LUNs off it is the right thing to do).
To be clear, I am not trying to be “elitist”. But, trying to tell someone that a NUC, (miniature PC without any serious expansion except USB), is not a good choice for use with ZFS and TrueNAS simply does not work. Give them the warning, suggest good backups and configuration backups, and then let them go. Perhaps the NUC will work perfect for as longs as they need it.
I just had to recover a virtualized Solaris 11.4 server because it appears our SAN decides to write a blank partition table on a disk that is "not in use". Except that I shut down the server gracefully, on purpose for hardware work, (aka firmware update of the Control Domain).
After we verified that our choices were attempt partition table re-creation, or restore the whole bloody server, we tried the partition table re-creation. That worked, ZFS pool was importable. (Minor issue that the boot block was also gone… but another 20 minutes and we figured that out.)
No chance of a casual ZFS user performing hard core recoveries.
2 Likes
Do you get a treat every time you put down BSD?