Couldn’t say, for me it was way way easier than ESXI which was my first break into the space. And also more complete / straightforward than bare metal which was what I had been doing before unraid.

I paid for the lifetime license. No regrets.

Because it’s easy and does all the hard stuff out of the box? Also any sized drives!

Oh hi I picked up Linux for the CLI and shell and the UI for me has nothing to do with it.

There is no easy way to break into the scene and unraid is a one stop shop. So you want to set up a few little projects on your own? It’s learning containerization, learning networking and NAT, figuring out filesystems (and shares and share locations) and backup strategies, how to integrate with VPN, deployment strategies and templates (think Ansible, docker compose, make scripts, etc). There’s a shitload to know and not a “for dummies” place to learn it.

Considering the “easy” first project of ARR suite + jackett, integrate with transmission, and integrate with jellyfin or Plex: this is not a couple hours of work if you’ve never done it before. With unraid it’s probably one video tutorial and less than an hour? Idk I haven’t done that one yet. But it’s a common request.

There are a lot of things that need to hang together for a good homelab to work, and unraid for me has made it so I don’t have to spend all my time doing plumbing and background work to try a project and see if I even want to use it.

I would absolutely do a 101 on self hosting, but it seems everybody has different priorities on what to host and how so it’s probably not cut and dry to implement.

Lots of programming and server use for jobs at work. I spent whole days in WSL (just one window) or putty / cygwin and it was stupid. About that time, since I was using different hosts pretty frequently, I started to learn Vim and it was a gateway drug.

It was maybe 2 weeks into vim I made the switch in the office. When I switched to Linux at work, I switched to Linux at home for consistency (and because I wasnt really gaming at the time so no big deal). At that job I frequently would just remote in from home so it made sense. Once I learned the ropes I switched to arch and dwm and never looked back. I guess I’m an nvim guy now so I’ve evolved a little in 15 years or so.

Yep. My home assistant production deploy is on a separate rpi, same as my pihole, and I’ve promoted out a few other services out of unraid. As an almost 40 father of 2 with a full time gig, I don’t want to dick around with experiments that interrupt the rest of the family and I also don’t want to spend a year of “30 mins before bed” to figure out how to deploy a service I’m not even sure I want to use long term.

Exactly. I like doing clever scripting and neat one off projects, I don’t like having to become a networking expert, a containerization expert, a hardware expert, and an integration expert so my wife can reliably watch law and order.

I can roll a custom arch build no problem, but I can not set up custom vlan or nat rules or easily swap to a new file system with baked in snapshots or tell you anything about how my GPU compares to anything on the market or how to make it reliably perform hardware acceleration. I would be happy to learn those skills, but sometimes it’s all just too much.

If I’m gonna do it, I want to do it. If I need to verbatim copy someone’s YouTube video where I use proxmox to use someone’s Ubuntu KDE VM to set up couch potato, I’d rather just use unraid and not pretend I’m a FOSSing haxor :).

Already bought the lifetime license. It’s great, I don’t miss rolling my own bare metal arch servers.

(Because I still do that too)

Edit:

Unraid is stupidly point and shoot. It just works for whatever weird configuration of hardware you have and the provisioning is extremely intuitive, fast, and it just fucking works. Why yes, I will have a paperless server and have it auto update and sure here let’s make this space a samba drive to receive docs. Paperless is not brain surgery in arch, but man 5 minute setup for stuff is nice. Ive got maybe 10 containers running that I set up the first time I launched Unraid more than a year ago and I otherwise haven’t touched it. The upside and downside is that I didn’t have to learn anything to do it. Esp if you get your stuff from the same maker/provider the latest versions all hang together and updating can just be automated.

The 42U rack in the basement will be… hard to steal.

I only use 3U of it for compute and all of it came from my university salvage for less than… $350 total (switch, rack, 2 servers).

Yes I do. Nvim / dwm life.

Still gotta have it for web browsing though. Vimium is kinda stupid and qutebrowser never worked quite like I expected, like most minimal browsers or extensions unfortunately.

All you laptop folks are like aliens to me lol. I have one, but it’s rarely used unless I have to leave my lair.

I have not, I wasn’t aware it existed until right now.

I guess we will see. Tiling WM on Wayland was, at my last check, totally limited to sway. As a dwm guy Wayland has yet to give me what I need.

I edit files with vimwiki. I view them in obsidian.

Or at least I used to, I wrote a few little functions to do zettels now, but the linking and traversal features of vimwiki are still really useful.

First sentence of each paragraph: correct.

Basically all the rest is bunk besides the fact that you can’t count on always getting reliable information. Right answers (especially for something that is technical but non-verifiable), wrong reasons.

There are “stochastic language models” I suppose (e.g., click the middle suggestion from your phone after typing the first word to create a message), but something like chatgpt or perplexity or deepseek are not that, beyond using tokenization / word2vect-like setups to make human readable text. These are a lot more like “don’t trust everything you read on Wikipedia” than a randomized acid drop response.

I played FF7 only and loved it. I did not care for the first remake game, and have not finished it. Hanging at like 70% complete.

Darktable.

I recommend sticking with it and customizing the visible tools to your liking. Especially if you’re not trying to power user, there’s not that much to it.

It’s not super “discoverable” meaning it’s hard to just sit down and use it if you have never done it before, but it IS effective.

What a fat old piece of trash.

Just two cents on “downloading”. System setup and programs are basically all from your distro’s package manager with sometimes a couple of things from GitHub if you have particular needs.

For the rest of stuff (media / files / more) there is no windows defender and I don’t personally try to chase down antivirus. You can totally get malicious stuff out there so maybe don’t click pop ups and download everything the pirate bay has to offer, but security is more baked into the Linux permission structure and user space. Find a guide and do it “the Linux way” if you decide you need to go set up deluge or transmission with a private tracker to get some Linux ISOs for personal use.

Some people do a lot of sweating over the security of the system, but I would generally say if you need that… you’ll know it. Sure a VPN is a good idea (I don’t use one for anything), good permissions are important (I don’t play the immutable OS game), and encryption may have a place for you (or maybe not, not everyone needs a luks filesystem system encrypted at rest); but you’re making a setup that you can use / prefer to use. Make your own call, basically anything on the beaten track is safe enough and sane enough.

8 up zero down yo. Maybe you’re using those features, but looks like it’s not exactly controversial not using them.

Y tho?

I’ve done split view on purpose like twice ever. The bubble mode and most split view things are an unwelcome accident IMO.

Voyager Mobile is short swipe to upvote and long swipe to downvote. Sometimes mistakes happen.