“Freedom Box”
Looks inside
Debian stable with webui
Never really sure what the audience for these things is. I wouldn’t say that self hosting is that difficult but if the first time setup already scares someone away how are they going to cope when they need to do some manual maintenance or recovery, something that isn’t accomplished by following simple step by instructions.
Nextcloud isn’t exactly low maintenance.
Matrix I don’t see why someone who isn’t extremely into self hosting should want their own home sever.
What are the odds of running mail server from residential IP working out well?
Installing murmur is the easy part, getting into order where it’s actually enjoyable to use, not so much.
Syncthing is cool but you don’t need a server node.
What when the Debian version is no longer supported?
The audience is definitely there. People want free, privacy-respecting, software available to all their devices independent of platform. That audience includes tons of people who are unable to implement or maintain those things and people who can’t even articulate that they want this.
The problem with these types of solutions is that self hosting is difficult and requires lots of upkeep. None of the plug-and-play type solutions are elegant at smoothing over this difficulty while being remotely configurable.
Any simple GUI to admin this type of setup quickly becomes too basic the moment you need to do something that they haven’t added UI sugar for. So then you need the whole complexity of traditional hosting solutions like container orchestration tools and their associated networking…the same problem these users were avoiding in the first place.
The ideal tools are basically Kubernetes Dashboard / Headlamp, but with a click-to-install chart store with preloaded configs to simplify ootb self-hosting. Maybe all of this built on top of a batteries included Kubernetes distro. But again all of this still requires skills far above the level of the type of person looking for these solutions.
The problem of complexity and state management aren’t solved, nor do GUIs vibe well with declarative configuration. It takes a lot of experience to reach this conclusion, during which, most people would likely throw in the towel.
Sandstorm does that for the software they have adapted to it. https://sandstorm.org/
Kubernetes on a home server seems a bit much
Is this any better than CasaOS or ZimaOS?
https://www.zimaspace.com/zimaos/download
I took a chance and installed ZimaOS a while back, paid for premium so I could use more than 4 drives for my NAS, but it’s VERY clunky and not polished. Numerous times, I’d have services offline, an inaccessible NAS drive (SMB shares offline), and just utter OS/webUI unresponsive requiring a reboot.
And If that’s not bad enough, Zima should simplify everything once you install an app, but required a lot of customization to setup and get functional especially for external access (NOT a fan of Immich on Zima IMO).
I switched it up to Yunohost, and that’s been worlds better in reliability, accessibility, and functionality!
This FreedomBox, what does it offer that so many others don’t?
