Hey that’s cheating!
If I asked my question five hours earlier, you’d look really silly right now! 
It’s when I checked. Broadly speaking, though, I think it’s safe to expect that Docker images will be more up-to-date than most distro-specific packages.
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Definitely distros that use “package version freezing” or iterative “releases”.
But not Arch Linux (and Arch-based) rolling distros.
Supposedly, I can use jlmkr to pull a base Arch jail.
A cluster compatible container orchestration system makes sense when you are planning on clustering scale with glusterfs
And then gluster died.
Somewhere out there @kris is twirling a fake mustache and laughing maniacally!
Maybe back to k3s with 25.04! 
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I’m fairly confident that the UI will be no more complicated than the current app ui.
The underlying app system will be changing, not the concept.
It’s just matter of migrating the config from one chart to another really.
Part of the magic that makes truenas work is migration scripts.
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And there’s nothing that could replace it? Surely Gluster can’t have been the only project offering that functionality. Like, I don’t know, Ceph? Or was one of SCALE’s headline features just not that important to iX?
Up to date multi-platform images are built an hour after upstream release and rebuilt at least once a week.
Ceph is the only viable alternative. To do it properly, however, you must get rid of ZFS. Ceph has its own native filesystem and they actively (maybe they even refuse it now) discourage the use of anything else. This would be an entirely different product altogether since ZFS is no longer in the equation.
Sure, there is lustre and lizardfs and moosefs but those have glaringly obvious caveats. (Paid for, small development teams, haven’t been around for a long time, murky corporate “ownership”, etc)
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Because, AFAIK, anything close to “point-and-click” software deployment is going to be running in Docker-ish containers. And I believe–though the Docker zealots don’t seem to[1]–a significant portion of the TrueNAS home users want point-and-click software deployment on their NASs. iX has believed this for some 15 years as well, ever since the release of FreeNAS 8.0 with plugins[2], though I’m wondering if they still believe it.
Time will tell how this works. Personally, I’ll be surprised if the iX docker-compose library continues to be a significant thing by, say, 25.10.
to the point that they’re arguing with me that “copy and paste a
docker-compose.ymlfile” is equivalent to point-and-click software deployment ↩︎the fact that plugins have never worked well is irrelevant; iX has believed people want them and put at least some effort into providing them for as long as they’ve owned FreeNAS, or now TrueNAS ↩︎
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Pipe down on the ad hominem.
Because I’m having trouble understanding what iX will ultimately do for the future of “Apps”, even after reading these posts.
Is this the plan? 
- User installs TrueNAS
- User clicks on “Apps” in the GUI menu
- The GUI asks them if they want to continue, and if they click “Yes”, some stuff happens in the background, automatically, without manual user intervention:
3a. A new (dedicated) dataset named “ixjail” (or something) is created
3b.jlmkrcreates a (dedicated) jail inside this dataset named “appsjail” (or something)
3c. Docker is automatically setup inside this “appsjail” jail - Browsing the catalog, the user can install apps of their choice, which utilizes (under-the-hood) the “appsjail” jail that resides on the “ixjail” dataset.
- Any and all Official / Community “Apps” installed in this manner exist under this dataset (and jail).
This implies, of course, that there will exist another GUI menu for manual “Linux jail” management, in the same spirit as “iocage” under Core.
If the above is in fact iXsystems’ plan, then I think it makes everyone happy: point-and-click users and “power users”.
Sort of like how we had a “Plugins” and a “Jails” menu in Core. 
All of my apps are custom made from docker hub.
Just to clarify: Will those apps be migrated somehow to docker from k3s ?
Will still be similar gui for docker to pull docker images and change settings like choosing what nic docker will use ?
I has some issues with k3s mostly during upgrade to never version of truenas. But now it seems to work stable - i’m still on 23.xx Cobia for now
Exacly this. At work i use QNAP with ZFS support. I was easily able to just add additional ssd to raidz. It just worked. Apps are easily managed to.
So i’d love for Truenas has similar usability. Apps included.
Are there any plans then to have backup solution for apps ?
Nothing in the post you’re replying to is in the same county with ad hominem. It’s harsh, yes, sometimes in ways I don’t agree with, but it isn’t ad hominem. And I think you’d be better off addressing the substance of the post than complaining about the tone, considering you’ve (iX, not you personally) just announced such a drastic change to your product. I don’t really believe this is the case, but it’s hard to resist the suspicion that this was done deliberately to “put the thumb in the eye” to TrueCharts, especially after changes you made in Dragonfish.
I’m kind of curious–and maybe you have this information from your telemetry; I know I don’t–what proportion of your users who use apps at all, use TrueCharts apps. My speculation would be that it isn’t a small number.
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Apps you deployed through the “Custom App” button (Docker) will convert to Compose YAML and those settings provided will be migrated.
For Backups - We intend to keep all the configuration stored with the application on pool. I.E so you can get at them, replicate and restore config as necessary elsewhere.
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Holy $h!t it’s actually happening 
After many years of trying to stick with FreeNAS/TrueNAS hopefully this will be the release that finally gets me to stay.
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Just painting with broad strokes here, moving to Docker makes a lot of sense. One thing that I’ve not seen mentioned in this thread yet is the fact we now have more options than ever.
You can, quite literally deploy any application you can imagine in multiple different ways directly on your storage appliance.
Apps, regardless of the backend, TrueNAS today (and in the future) offers the 1-click install “easy button” approach to end-users who need a helping hand. This change seems to focus on this core group of community users, and despite the growing pains I think they’ll be better off for it. Kubernetes exists to scale out at an enterprise level. The core userbase of Apps on SCALE today are almost assuredly home users. This announcement, if nothing else, shows a commitment by iX to that group, at least in my opinion.
Let’s not forget, we also just got Sandboxes. The power users benefit here, those who want to enjoy the light-weight benefits of “jails” and enjoy infinite customizability to suit their individual needs. This also gives users with insanely complex app environments a place to go. The community (@Stux in particular) has already invested in this approach and rather enjoy it. Before Sandboxes, people were hacking in and doing their own thing anyway.
The third wheel here is still very much alive. I am a die hard virtualization guy. You can rip my full phat VMs from my cold, bloodied, hands. I was a VMUG subscriber for years, and enjoyed running full-stack VCenter in my homelab from 6.5-7.0. I more-or-less effortlessly migrated all of my VMs over to SCALE about 2 years ago. I’ve even written articles on doing really cool nested secure data enclaves in SCALE.
Not to mention that TrueCharts is cooking up their own “thing” to be determined, so existing deployments seem to have migration paths either directly from iX, or from TrueCharts.
With the rapid development of technological change and innovation in general, obviously there is always growing pains. But in this case, it seems like we as a community have options
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One of that custom apps is Plex that has Nvidia P400 connected. Will it stil work ? I mean gpu access through docker ?
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We do keep a pretty close eye on the metrics. We know out of the entire fleet of TrueNAS SCALE systems in the wild a vast majority of them run Apps, 90-95% easily. Out of that bucket, we can look at specific apps like Traefik. Right now we see that Traefik, (including those coming from TrueCharts) are used on around 2% of systems in the wild. Maybe slightly higher accounting for some variables. We can look at that indicator and other apps coming from the TrueCharts catalog to get a rough ballpark of what percent of the fleet is using TC. It would be in the low single digit percents as well. While not an insignificant number in terms of total systems and users, its also not enough percentage wise to justify us keeping K3s around for the long haul. Especially when we’ve been hearing loud and clear from our community that they’d prefer to see it replaced with something lighter, easier to use and more mainstream, I.E. Docker / Compose.
Again, nothing malicious here, we’re walking the tightrope trying to best serve the needs of the wider TrueNAS user base. In this case the numbers of users who explicitly need K3s appears to be relatively small vs the larger number of Apps users in general.
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Yes, Docker / Compose supports GPU pass-through as well.
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