Hey guys simple question: Do you use self hosting solutions like CasaOS or Yunohost? Why or why don’t you?
This is more of a out of curiousity question since I am currently experimenting with different setups. ATM I prefer self hosting solutions because of the easiness of adding services.
I find they tend to make things more difficult, because as soon as you want to do anything outside of the nice box they give you, it’s much harder than doing it on a regular setup.
Plus these days basically every application has a docker image, and deploying with docker compose is really easy and quick.
I do use Proxmox and Portainer though, since they are mostly just sitting on top of standard systems.
To give you an idea of what you’ll experience in your self-hosting journey: adding services is the easy part, maintaining a system in production over many years is the hard part. And the self hosting solutions you mean are quite bad at that. Eventually I ditched even Proxmox because its updates are cumbersome and you never know wheter you’ll end up with a working system after the upgrade.
Ultimately, you want to avoid any complex transitions in your system altogether. Decouple everything, make everything disposable, especially your OS. The ootb-selfhosting-solutions are the antithesis of that: lots of hidden magic behind colorful buttons, which makes it immensely hard to get a working setup the second something goes wrong. And that will inevitably happen with time passing.
Well, managing servers is part of my job. So stuff like what you mention doesn’t really make it easier for me and it adds unnecessary overhead.
I’m a tinkering nerd, so I like to have a headless Linux box.
I did use self hosting operating systems in the beginning, and they’re nice. However, when I tried just a plain Ubuntu headless install, I felt way more accomplished after getting everything working.
Yeah I started with a headless Ubuntu server and it was real nice. I’m finally ready to leave Ubuntu though and want to switch to a headless NixOS server.
No, maybe use them as a toy for app discovery, but otherwise when those projects get eventually abandoned, then it’s a mess to move out
Plus they always try to hide how stuff works behind the scenes so that day that upgrade script has a bug and fails, it’s hard to revert to a working stage.
It’s like trying to get in the classic car business without any mechanical knowledge.
That 1950s Ford was working great when you bought it, but if you have no idea how it works, you need to pay hundreds to fix it. Except here it’s difficult to find someone that can drop in and fix your automated self hosted setup, even for money
Plus they always try to hide how stuff works behind the scenes so that day that upgrade script has a bug and fails, it’s hard to revert to a working stage.
Yunohost is creating backups for apps that are being updated. If update fails, it automatically reverts. Yes, it works, I checked.
those projects get eventually abandoned,
Yunohost is here for years now, and it does not look like it will be abondoned any time soon.
