Removal of K3s based apps from TrueNAS

[kris]

@dan

How big is the TrueCharts team? My impression has been that they’re pretty small, and I expect they all have day jobs–but they’ve been able to come up with a catalog of nearly 800 charts that frankly run circles around yours. That has to at least suggest that they aren’t all that “difficult to maintain, port and integrate.”

Fair, and we’ve also intentionally not really pushed the envelope on adding new Apps while we were not fully settled on Helm/K3s as the right tool for the job. That became apparent almost on day 1 as the bug tickets and feedback started rolling in

@dan

But an important question has come up that I don’t recall iX’ having answered: will Apps 2.0 allow for third-party app catalogs? Or is it walled off to only a single, iX-managed repo?

The new implementation will be a single catalog within the TrueNAS UI, which is fully open and has the same Community/Official/Enterprise train of applications. Pull requests welcome. This will be done for quality and supportability reasons primarily.

However on the flip-side the backend will be much more standard. Meaning we’re vastly simplifying what our middleware touches, and docker/compose will behave like it would on a traditional Linux install. This means it is possible to use 3rd party tools and mechanisms to “drive” docker around. Like Portainer, Dockge or other tools which can help manage your catalog of applications. Any person or group could potentially author their own “Catalog Management UI / Tool” and have it added as an App to our open catalog if they so choose. This means they have flexibility to build an interface as simple or complex as they want for whatever target audience they want to cater towards.

@dan

True enough. And how many of those compose files incorporate Ingress? VPN access? Codeserver? Homepage? I could go on, but these are enough to make the point: vanishingly few of the “official” docker-compose files provide any of these integrations; none provide all of them. Will iX’ New and Improved™ Apps provide them? I guess we’ll see, but I’m not betting on it, particularly since none of their Apps 1.0 charts did.

That is a fair point, and I’m not sure if we would try to add that type of integration yet. The reason being based on the numbers and how many people actually use/need ingress in a homelab. Judging from the usage stats, that appears to be a pretty small minority of current SCALE users, far less than <10%.

@dan

And I’m being pretty hard on iX here because they have a long history of “overpromise and underdeliver.” They love to announce great things, and then get distracted by teh new hawtness and the previous announcements fall by the wayside. Consider Plugins 1.0 (PBI), Plugins 2.0 (iocage), Asigra, Nextcloud, somewhere in there has to be the release formerly known as FreeNAS 10, and now Apps 1.0. Sure, their commitments don’t always fall through, but it still happens a lot. Now they’re promising a bigger, better, more up-to-date app catalog, because Docker is so much easier than k3s. I frankly don’t believe it, and I think I have plenty of objective reason to be skeptical–that is after all what they promised with Apps 1.0 (and the reason they gave), and before that with Plugins 2.0 (and, again, they gave the same reason).

Haha, I get a chuckle when I see folks bring up PBIs. That was my baby and pretty much a one-man show. I own that one At the end of the day there turns out to just not be that much demand for a FreeBSD-based desktop. Even trying to get buy-in for FreeBSD on a desktop/laptop with FreeBSD developers was tough, considering 60-75% FreeBSD developers at your typical BSD conference were running MacBooks. Even they had no time for that nonsense