[kimbernator]

I was like this in the "I love to spend a lot of time mucking about with my server and want to squeeze everything out of it that I can" phase.

In the last few years I've transitioned to "My family just wants plex to work and I could give a shit about the details". I think I'm more of the target audience. When I had my non-truenas zfs set up I just didn't pay a lot of attention, and when something broke it was like re-learning the whole system over again.

[organsnyder]

My way of dealing with this is to ensure everything is provisioned and managed via gitops. I have a homelab repo with a combination of Ansible, Terraform (Tofu), and FluxCD. I don't have to remember how to do anything manually, except for provisioning a new bare metal machine (I have a readme file and a couple of scripts for that).

I accidentally gave myself the opportunity to test out my automations when I decided I wanted to rename my k8s nodes (FQDN rather than just hostname). When I did that, everything broke, and I decided it would be easier to simply re-provision than to troubleshoot. I was up and running with completely rebuilt nodes in around an hour.

[Gud]

But configuring a FreeBSD system with zfs and samba is dead easy.

In my experience, a vanilla install and some daemons sprinkled on top works better than these GUI flavours.

Less breakage, fewer quirks, more secure.

YMMV and I’m not saying you’re wrong - just my experience

[bombcar]

I agree; I tried Free/TrueNAS and some other flavors of various things and always ran into annoying limitations and handholding I didn’t want; now I just use Gentoo with ZFS and do my own thing.