I’m planning on, eventually, putting together a NAS for myself. I’ve basically narrowed down the selection to either trying NixOS or going for TrueNAS, however I can’t figure out how to decide between those two, as they are fundamentally quite different.
TrueNAS is a dedicated NAS OS so that’s obviously enticing for me, but I heard if you also want to do some server stuff like hosting some things and not just storing data it is subpar? I never got the information out of people what exactly is supposed to be subpar about it, but I’ve seen those complaints a handful of times.
Meanwhile NixOS is just a Linux distro. I’m familiar enough with Linux, although NixOS is its own beast and from what I heard its documentation isn’t quite what you’d get out of for instance the Arch Wiki, but it being declarative and easy to restore old versions in case something breaks allegedly makes it rock solid, so that also sounds interesting.
So, after thinking about those things, I was wondering if any of you who use either of them could share your experiences and what you like or dislike about either option?
How well NixOS fits your purpose really depends on what you want to do with the OS. If you’re just going run a bunch of docker containers, you could manage them via Nix but its a little cumbersome.
Where NixOS really shines for small servers are the so called NixOS Options. They allow you to install tons of services on bare metal but manage all the configuration for you. E.g. open the correct firewalls ports, run a dedicated DB or cache, etc. and all those simply require you to enable them with an
... = true;.Smaller projects might not have a NixOS Option available and some options are more and/or easier configurable than others, but if you’re running just a few common services you could feasibly manage your whole server with just one native config file and no docker shenanigans.
I’d recommend checking what’s available under the link above. If you wanna go the container route instead, you have the option of just using docker non-declaratively as on every other distro (but then you lose some of the benefits NixOS gives you), or you can declaratively have NixOS manage all the docker containers. There are a few ways to do and manage this so some further research will be required.