this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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NixOS and/or TrueNAS - What are your experiences? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 3 days ago by CatLikeLemming@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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?

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[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 3 days ago

I haven't tried TrueNAS, but I use NixOS for my NAS and my other servers. It's perfect for servers imo since it's essentially a Linux system builder that you can customize to add whatever you want to your system.

The downside is that you'll have to learn a weird functional programming language, especially when you get into writing service modules yourself (for services that don't have an upstream module). And it'll take some time to get familiar with it and learn how to effectively write your configuration.