LTT DOES NOT fork TrueNAS

No one is putting down BSD. @dan has been very helpful, active, and supportive of CORE IMHO.

But on a side note, that’s not what this thread is about.

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That’s wonderful and “thank you, Dan”.

I don’t think the thread is about that either but the sidebar came up and there seems to be a huge division (and getting wider). Forking is complex (economically, logisticly, etc) on the end user as well as the developers. Forking should not be taken lightly.

What are you reading as my putting down BSD?

The insinuation that Hex was a more streamline, user friendly, etc and a BSD fork would be the opposite (not sleek, user friendly, etc).

If that was not your intention, I apologize.

Nothing at all to do with BSD as such, more to do with CORE. The CORE GUI is kind of klunky, and hasn’t been touched in almost three years other than to remove the Shell button in 13.3. Sleek, streamlined, and user friendly it isn’t. Neither is SCALE’s GUI, but it is (IMO) closer.

AFAIK, there’s no reason the SCALE GUI (or something better yet) couldn’t be put on CORE (or NewCore, or whatever), but I don’t expect that would be too high on the priority list for whoever would hypothetically be making this fork.

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Sorry, I came from the original Unix BSD and do love it, BUT, the reality, we like it or not, is that there is more developers, apps and interest in Linux than BSD.

BSD has a very specific niche, but for everything else, Linux can do the job and can actually work better than BSD (USB drives, drivers for less-common devices, available end-user software).

I do see BSD being left behind as we move forward with Linux. Yes, they will continue to release BSD versions (for the foreseeable future), but new features, technologies or break-throughs? I do not see that.

That’s the main reason I moved from CORE to Scale (plus the Scale features themselves).

After all, an OS is JUST a tool and we change tools when worn or a new one with more features and power comes around, right?

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I never liked the guy much and the few things I watched from him, he never impressed me with any real Computer Science knowledge.

I follow real experts, not wanna-be computer technicians.

He only wants money, so I bet they will come up with a “subscription” based scheme to
“sell their product”.

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I wonder if HexOS ascribe to the view that you can put lipstick on a a pig, but it’s still a pig. Just layering a different GUI on of top of some part of TrueNAS ties you to all the existing design decisions for better or worse.

Perhaps I’m in a minority of one, but rather than chasing that illusive ideal UI, I’m more interested how sleek the underlining system is. I’ve stuck with ixSystems from FreeNAS 9 to current TrueNAS CORE 13. But after the March announcements, I’m actively thinking of moving to FreeBSD 14.1. My needs from a file server are pretty basic. The obvious barrier is learning enough about FreeBSD to return to a CLI only system.

I get FreeBSD may be left behind by Linux, so yes I could install and configure a pure debian server without apt pinning contortions and live with the increasing encroachment of systemd bloat, wrestle with zfs on root and how to do boot environments, or pick alpine or void for a systemd free world. Or, I could simply give in and use Proxmox.

For now, I live in hope I can master enough of FreeBSD to do what I want if Core 13.3 disappoints.

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This part is unfortunately true.

No comment at this time.

To each his own I suppose. See this meme

Again. Debatable. BSD for me has everything I need or want. There are many things that are far superior in BSD than linux.

As far as Linux having more power, being better, and trumping BSD, that’s a long discussion for another thread…

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Definitely. If that is really going to happen, the general consensus seems to be to rip out all modifications as much as feasible and build middleware and UI on stock FreeBSD and stock ports.

Anything else will not be maintainable by a small open source volunteer team.

Valuable additions by iX should be upstreamed. My broken record since the days of the last alliance.

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I somewhat disagree. I hate the SCALE UI. Because it collapses the menu tree whenever you make a selection.

Now believe it or not, serially clicking through every single menu is a thing I do frequently. When setting up a new box and of course after every update.

The SCALE UI forces me to keep state in my brain. “Waitaminute … where was I?”

Similarly if you pick the wrong submenu. Especially “System” is way more arbitrarily sorted into categories than in CORE, and (to me!) really confusing.

You always need to start at the top level again instead of navigating through the menu system serially. A good UI keeps (and shows!) the state for you instead of removing it after every click.

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What’s this? A NAS company caught off their guard?

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The simpler the better. For me, things like replication are real nice when GUIfied. Just gives a nice overview to know your data has been replicated.

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Absolutely. I could do everything TrueNAS does with plain FreeBSD and Ansible, but a UI is particularly nice to check the current state of affairs!

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Coming in Electric Eel:

New advanced search for finding pages and settings in the SCALE UI (NAS-127224).

:wave: tree based navigation…

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I day sort of got away from me and I got lost in the thread so this is just a general post to whomever.

A while back FreeBSD got in trouble for “Binary Blobs” and the concept was third parties were providing binary drivers and FreeBSD was just linking them in to provide the widest support possible. Linux (redhat–but SystemD, specifically) does just that; shamelessly! You also have one of the lead developers telling others it’s fun and cool to ignore POSIX and security standards. The fact that Linux and SytemD blindly link in without security checks makes Linux and SystemD a huge attack surface (the recent “xzUtils” isn’t the last of it’s kind). I notice that TrueNAS links in xzUtils, BTW. Check anyone?

Because personal servers are where people tend to store personal information, and BSD is a smaller code base and more eaisly hardened it is better suited to hosting personal information (taxes, security codes, birth certificates, “personal information”, etc) as well as company information.

Generally speaking, what do YOU think a server is (a place to store and serve up movie and music files)? Are da-hackers coming after your movies?

It was mentioned that the UI for CORE is different than the UI for SCALE. Interesting! That says a lot about the archicture actually.

I’m just going to drop this here:

Maybe a possible solution (instead of a fork) would be to keep the codebase in iX control but community members could extend based on iX review and/or overall “best direction” to take. -e.g need ACME tool, tap into API xyz.

Sounds like this:

…or the script that’s built in to acme.sh.

Nice. Can’t look (on my phone) but isn’t there a tool called ANVIL to do certs?

https://dan.langille.org/2017/07/15/introducing-anvil-tools-for-distributing-ssl-certificates/

Interesting; I hadn’t heard of that one. Another project that seems similar in concept is Cert Warden:

Both of them differ from my script in that (1) my script is intended to be run on the NAS itself (though it could run anywhere that has HTTP(S) access to the NAS), and (2) my script uses the TrueNAS API to deploy the script. Anvil and Cert Warden seem to be more general tools.