I Tried HexOS and It's Not For Me... [YouTube Release]

Chapters
00:00 HexOS Beta Release
01:40 How To Install and Setup HexOS
03:00 Setting up Users and Shares
03:49 Storage Management
04:00 Application Setup
06:02 Drive Management
06:40 HexOS Roadmap and Buddy Backups
08:00 Local Interface Management

xMAXIMUSx · December 1, 2024, 10:57pm

HexOS is trash. All they did was slap a new front end to truenas and want to make you pay for it. I’m not a Linus fan either and with his hand in funding this furthers my dislike towards him and this project.

Greg_E · December 2, 2024, 2:22pm

I’ll kind of echo Maximus.

Now, Truenas is an open project, if they wanted a local “easy mode”, why not just submit this back to the project so that we could go to something like:

h**ps:\ Truenas_server/easymode

Or

h**ps:\ Truenas_server/hard_mode

It just seems like a money grab on top of a free and open source project.

bb77 · December 3, 2024, 9:10am

You already answerd this one yourself, because then they couldn’t charge money for it

But maybe iX Systems should consider implementing an “easy mode” themselves and thus take the wind out of the sails of products like this.

This would be extra work, of course, but it could also open up new sales opportunities for their lower-end appliances in small businesses and SMBs that don’t have a dedicated IT department and are therefore more likely to buy something like Synology instead of TrueNAS, which requires less expert knowledge to configure.

xMAXIMUSx · December 3, 2024, 2:00pm

I would argue that if using any kind of storage solution will require learning how to use it. It doesn’t matter how “easy” they claim it is to use or set up.

If they want it purely to install docker apps then they will learn how to do it. If they want an SMB share they will learn how to use it. There is a reason trueNAS has manuals. I’d also argue that making it “easy” will water down the functionality. Inevitably a user will need to do an advanced operation or setting and will have to do this in a hacky way to accomplish this. I say it is easier to use trueNAS as it is with a user wanting to do simple stuff which IMO isn’t hard. And when needing to do advanced configurations it is already available to the user. Instead HexOS sends you to the trueNAS UI anyway when going outside the scope of “easy”.

Greg_E · December 4, 2024, 3:19pm

Have any of you moved to Electric Eel? Making a pool is far easier now than it was under Core11, adding a vdev and making an SMB share is now far easier than it was under Core11. The permissions is the last thing that they could make to be simple.

OK, maybe making a pool could be easier, but you can use the “skip to the last step” button after the first 2 steps and create it, or click through the other “confusing” configuration options.

LTS_Tom · December 4, 2024, 3:34pm

HexOS received a quarter million from Linus and he is not the only investor. People underestimate just how hard it is to write software that manages that level of complexity and is actually good.

There are fewer and fewer open source appliance projects such as Firewalls and Storage Servers because getting funding for an open source project is so hard today.

Netgate is an easy example, they fund both FreeBSD (they are a top contributor) development and pFsense development from selling their hardware that people complain a lot about the price. They have a home licence option that seems to cause anger in the community despite it being only $129 annually to help support development.

Every year the open source dev community get’s older and less new people are joining. The Open Source Security Podcast did a good recent episode on it.

xMAXIMUSx · December 4, 2024, 5:21pm

I never had an issue paying for pfsense. I believe that companies spending time and resources for a good product should get paid. Just because the software is open source doesn’t mean we shouldn’t spend money. Nothing is free and always comes at a cost. Either there is a ton of contributors that don’t mind to spend their time keeping the software up-to-date, squashing bugs, adding features, etc. Or it is done with paying a company or the devs.

I’m not going to preach on OSS. All I am saying is, TureNAS is not a hard system to navigate. I completely understand that some users that are completely computer illiterate will need guidance or an “easy” mode. This HexOS product is useless for all the reasons I mentioned above.

Storage appliances all have their ways of working and you still have to learn what SMB’s, permissions, datasets, docker apps, and so on are and how to deploy them. In that case just install TureNAS and save your money.

Greg_E · December 4, 2024, 7:23pm

Isn’t the easy button kind of the bread and butter for Synology? One of those, if you need a bunch of storage, but don’t want to run an IT company, buy this?

I’m guessing the same could be said for the Unifi NAS that recently came out. There are products for people that just need easy storage.

As long as some of this new development gets put back into Truenas, it’s probably fine, just not for me as I’m finding the latest Scale to be easier or at least more streamlined that older versions going back to Freenas 9. With these changes, setting up basic storage is now a very quick job.

As far as paying for OSS, I am when I can, but sometimes the products have risen higher than my requirements. We ended up with Truenas Mini-R as being a possible device for a budget request. It was about the same price as the DIY Supermicro I used for the original idea. What I buy if I get the money, not really sure yet, 9 more months before I know if I’ll even get the option.

I did buy a 3 year license to OPNsense, and requested one of their hardware firewalls in the same budget. Looking at the specs for their firewall, it would be similar in price to anything that I would build from a new Supermicro server, therefore, their product looks like a reasonable amount of money. Some of the Netgate products hit this same price point and feature set, some do not. I had a discussion with Franco on their forums about the OPNsense hardware. He said they were “expensive”, I disagreed and laid out the Supermicro analogy above, he then agreed that cost was on par with some DIY builds that a person might do.

After all that, I guess we will see where this goes with Hex"OS" (quotes since it runs on Truenas). Some people will love it, some will hate it, and eventually a bunch of us will either use it or ignore it. I would have given them more credit if they made it work on things like the Rockchip ARM devices like this one Radxa ROCK 5 ITX RK3588 mini-ITX motherboard review - Building an Arm PC and NAS with Debian KDE - CNX Software or this one CM3588

That CM3588 almost got bought for my lab, if I thought I would have been able to patch Truenas Scale into it, it would have been done. Not enough confidence in my abilities to get that working so I went a different way with an Atom powered board and SATA drives. No OMV wasn’t going to cut it for this, for me.

bb77 · December 5, 2024, 8:34am

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. It was just a thought on my part, and I can’t really judge if developing something like that would be sustainable for iX Systems and/or in line with their overall business strategy.

Personally, I can live with the TrueNAS interface and I always found my way around it to do the things I want to do with it, also because of people like you who are willing to share their knowledge with others. Thanks for doing that, by the way