TL:DR - have you used UmbralOS on a non-umbral device? Is it pretty straightforward? Reliable? Easy to use for a simple media server?
THE TL: SO my mini-pc's M.2 SSD shit the bed, and I'm essentially forced to rebuild my media server from backups, etc. I keep my actual media on USB external drives, and backup my configs/YAML regularly, so not the end of the world. I've put in a new SSD and ready to restart... but as they say, each problem is also an opportunity, and I'm considering switching the structure/interface of the server.
Instead of pure, headless CLI ubuntu server, I previously used CasaOS, as, at the time, I was new to hosting, and other users in my household are absolutely allergic to CLI and pretty much always will be. CasaOS is nice because the Debian CLI is there for me if I need it, but running on top is an "Okay" GUI that has familiar things like "apps" and folders with folder structures. Even though I'm much more experienced than I was, say, a year ago, I still think I'd rather not do "pure" CLI docker compose. I only need a couple, simple services, that are easier for other household members to interact with independently if it has a GUI. If you think there's a compelling reason I should change my mind on that, tell me why.
CasaOS over the past year ish has started to feel very much like abandonware, however, as they've moved to ZimaOS (which is waaay more than we need, I'm not running a RAID or trying to set up 20+self-hosted services...Does anyone have experience with UmbralOS (especially on NON-Umbral hardware, and with USB external HDD storage) It's for a simple media & file hosting experience via Jellyfin, primarily.
We're running an ARR stack, Jellyseer & Jellyfin with Nextcloud for photos & documents. My mini pc is a GEEKOM Air12 LITE which is not particularly beefy on specs... though I'm going to add another 8 gb of RAM to it when I upgrade. Any thoughts/advice are so greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Started with the beta of CasaOS, really welcoming discord community and all, but when I went from a busted laptop to a purpose-built machine, I dove into the deep end and went with Proxmox.
It can be daunting at first with all that lingo but there are plenty of good tutorials. Can't recommend enough. Also as a gap closer, there's proxmox community scripts, which are great to spin new LXCs to tinker with and learn/try new stuff without annoying the family with downtime
Man, when I looked at the prox mox in action videos I got dizzy - so much stufffff! What would you say are the biggest advantages? It seems like it would be more of a project to take on...
Definetly don't need to go all in, you can start with a few LXCs from the community scripts
Biggest advantage for me is not having to juggle with ports or modify stuff that I already have running to try something new. Each LXC gets its own IP so I can start a new copy of let's say Jellyfin to tinker with, and use what I learned to fix/improve my running instance.
Another really neat thing is how it handles backups. I have my LXCs on their own ZFS subvolumes and I back them up sporadically to external drives (cold storage). Backups start as a single big file but all the subsequent are way smaller, and checking and restoring them is a 2-click endeavour.
It looks corporate and intimidating, but it has an awesome community and you don't need to learn all the bells and whistles to get a lot out of it