Theyre not. I wouldn't say they're the best, but If anyone says you shouldn't use Windows then they just don't know what they're talking about.

Windows has a lot of advantages. Ease of use, familiarity with most people, lots of features. It also has a lot of cons, lots of overhead (it takes more resources to do every task, less advanced features, features behind pay walls and licensing.

That being said it's a great place to start. You can run a windows server eval indefinitely by resetting the license every 90 days. You will learn a lot, and maybe upgrade later.

It’s also artificially restricted as an SMB server. Has been since XP SP2.

Reboots every tuesday night because microsoft cant make a patch that doesnt require a reboot?

If you can get away with running hyper-v for your other needs/oses why not?

Do you mean windows server or windows 11 acting as a server.

If you already paid for it sure. But if you're thinking of getting windows server standard then that'll cost you vs a free nix based OS.

I haven’t seen a home share the single reason I think is the most important - if you’re using Linux as your server OS you are virtually guaranteed to find an answer to any problem you run into with almost zero effort. A lot of the answers for windows server related problems are going to be directed at professionals who are working in relatively complex IT organizations because these are the people using windows server.

You’ll find you can quite literally paste whatever error you’re getting on your Linux host into Google and someone will have seen the problem and there will 5 different solutions which will probably all work.

You’ll fine yourself in a situation where you say, “I wonder if I can do with my server,” and not only will someone have already done it before they’ll have a source code repository you can download their solution from and have it up and running in 10 minutes.

I know right now you’re at, “all I want to do is run a simple NAS,” but even just doing that you’re likely to run into some issue where a file copy won’t happen or a backup is failing and you need help. With Linux you’re likely to find a bunch of people who know how to fix it (or have already fixed it) and are willing to help you. If you’re using a windows server you’re much more likely to run into people saying, “idk bro - you should be using Linux.”

Because until recent versions of Windows 11, HyperV and WSL were garbage. It's actually not a horrible option now. I actually use it as my homelab second "hypervisor" as it is always on anyway and it gives me a second always on server for redundant apps with almost no extra power usage.

I’ve run a Windows based home lab for around 10 years now. I use Windows Server as the OS tho and I use it as a Hyper-V server.

I do have a couple of Linux VMs running for things like Home Assistant, Frigate and TeslaMate, but everything else is in a Windows VM - specifically a Server Core VM.

Hyper-V itself is pretty capable when compared to the other options as well. Some of my VMs have PCI cards passed to them via DDA and I recently set up GPU partitioning to share a GTX 1650 between some of those Windows and Linux VMs

It's not so much the Windows is a bad OS for running a NAS but more there are other purposely made OSes for NAS use that have better support for functions that a NAS is expected to runn.

I agree that Windows Desktop has more overhead to run an manage. However, if I remember correctly, Windows Desktop has a limit on the number of open sockets it will allow to listen for incoming connections.

You will hit a point when you SMB shares may drop, and other servers running open listening ports will lose connection. You would be better off using a server OS for the things you want to do. You could try using:

Window Server Linux OS distros FreeBSD

You should install anti-virus on whatever you're running, and maybe a firewall as well.

Are you going to use hardware RAID or do you have some specific software RAID server in mind (like unRAID)?

What got me interested in home-labbing was to be able to play with software RAID with a bunch of disks, NAS for home use and backing up, and some media serving.

In the end, what scratched my itch was the robustness of TrueNAS Scale (and ZFS itself) and it's user interface. I just love it.

But it does take some tinkering (and learning Linux) to get it working. But I wanted to remember some Linux and now it runs by itself.

Windows Desktop OS has the huge downside of forced updates these days. And they will just reboot, no matter if you want or not.

Server version is fine, you often even get it for free when you are a student for lab purposes, but it has way more overhead than Linux. 8GB is bare minimum for a Windows server, probably even more these days. If you run some services or even exchange / sql server, you need way more. A minimal Ubuntu runs fine on 512MB and Ubuntu is already quite high in memory usage compared to others. You can get away with even less of a footprint.

Most of popular apps are cross platform and at least have windows variants or at least have some great replacements, so it's hard to miss something (with few exceptions). Of course licensing violation it the thingg... but using server without gui can save a lot of resources and give a great experience of learning powershell (and how bad regular command like life in windows is...)

Windows will use more resources idling than anything Linux, or purpose built will. You can do anything with windows as it turns out. After reading in r/homelab you might think, wow, no one runs a server on windows, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. TONS of enterprise runs on windows, and almost ALL small businesses runs on windows. It’s easy, simple, and there’s a cost for that. Windows Server is a purpose built windows version for being a server, there’s some more management built in, but really, at it’s core, windows 10/11 pro will do just fine for home use.

The only real issue is reliability. Server versions are made to maintain as much uptime as possible, Windows Server updates don’t always require a restart (except Patch Tuesdays), whereas the desktop version almost always does and will do so without any warning. If you’re using it for home use, does that matter? Probably less so, considering downtime doesn’t cost you money it saves it if anything. Plenty of mom and pop offices use off the shelf desktop PCs as “servers” cause it’s more cost efficient.

As most people said, I would go for something like TrueNAS, Proxmox or the best - Unraid that do cost a bit but will not break the bank - https://unraid.net/pricing

If you really have to I suppose Windows client versions will work as for servers. But Windows server version is much nicer to use.

Use windows along side a linux distro. Then slowly learn to do some small things on linux. After a while you will get used to it. After some months you will wonder why you even used windows. I dont think I have to bring anymore arguments because the comment section did a good job why it’s better to ditch windows.

It's actually fine.

Just make sure you enable and disable the right services on it and enjoy

Because of gatekeeping and snobbery.

I love it when Linux dudes say “Linus uses less resources than windows” but have some dual cpu monster space heater server from 10 years ago that sounds like a vacuum cleaner. Your consuming NATRUAL resources bro lol. That said I totally use Linux visualized and on a few Pi’s But windows will always be my go to. Not because it’s better. It’s what I know waaaaaay n anything else.

Run what you know best in your crucial machines. Play around sand boxed area on non crucial hardware.

My typical post to these questions is that I run the following without issue:

Windows 11 Pro for Workstations

Drivepool + Scanner + Snapraid is what controls my storage, which is currently something like 26x 20tb drives.

These are my personal reasons. I stress personal because everyone is different.

• it doesn't do what I tell it to do, but what Microsoft thinks I should want
• difficult to automate (I've been told this has been getting better, but I'm still not convinced)
• if things don't work as I expect, I can't look at the source code

In most cases I'm much less frustrated by using non-Windows alternatives in infrastructure. For example when I build Windows binaries, I use wine on linux.

windows is a trash server os for use by people who should know better. pick a flavor of linux, or Open/Net/FreeBSD it’ll do a better job of serving your data.

ok ok, that was a little harsh, some of them do know and choose to take the wrong path.

Windows uses the NTFS File system and TrueNAS uses the OpenZFS file system which is superior to NTFS for storing your data. I'd do some reading on the OpenZFS file system to check out the benefits over NTFS. Running TrueNAS is really easy, you can check it out on Youtube, (installation and configuration videos). The book FreeBSD Mastery:ZFS (Michael W Lucas, Allan Jude) is also a good read on everything ZFS.

I've been using linux as a daily driver now for over a year, due to qualms with the direction microsoft has taken, but thats beside the point really.

Yeah there is some stuff you need to learn if you wish to manually manage a linux install. But when it comes to something like truenas, and I assume unraid as well, for a simple use case you will never need to touch the internals. I run truenas, opnsense (bsd)m plex and proxmox. Those use either linux or bsd, and they are set up so I never need to even touch the internals (well proxmox I do some but thats from dealing with gpu pass through. Same with plex, the only thing I ever had to touch with plex was an fstab edit to mount my network drives which is a few lines of text in a file and you can find what to type online.

But say you use truenas, all you have to do is run the installer and you are ready to go with a stable system, the rest is managed through the gui. The only time I ever touched anything relating to the command line was to do a burn-in on my disks, and that's optional. If you do choose to run windows you will have to do more configuration, deal with more unwarranted issues from it being a desktop os, and in the end spend more time messing with it.

Homelab software has gotten to the point that 95% of what you would need to do involving the underlying system is abstracted away in a GUI.

Datacentre + 25 years of Linux expertise here:

Design the system around how you use your data, how important your data is, and where you want to back it up etc. Forget about chossing te platfor first..but..

Open source gives you WAY more options, Windows will just share files.

Eg Open souce NAS will ley you sync and aggregate all your cloud storage and backup apps as one single virtual cached storage directory all avaiable in your file explorer. No stupid clients and bloat. Open source will give you snapshots too. All sync happen in the backgroud with real intergrity checking. (For example, look at RCLONE as a wonderful onedrive client replacement for a virtual cloud filesystem, just run this on your NAS. )

Open source also lets you add unlimited Backblaze backup to you NAS without the business subscription (if you've got a few basic Linux skills.)

Open source also allows a wide array of virutual machines or containers for other handy home network utilities (think always-on pi hole, DNS add blockers etc)

Funnily enough, I made some measurements too on Windows power use. On an old Mac mini, it used less running native Windows than MacOS (less than 2w vs 3.5w).

I've 16GB / i7 Kaby Lake era laptops that will run Windows 10/11 powered up with an active (native) Intel LAN connected at 0.9w idle with services like MySQL installed and running. (0.9w with a USB meter, 1.2w at the wall). Windows is light now, people are still talking like we're in the Win95/XP days.

For those not familiar with the multitude of Linux services and config with simple needs, Windows is great.

Bad stuff: cost (thought there's legalish ways around that), it will reboot for updates if you're not on a server version (though click the delay and manually update once a month to avoid that), MS installing new stuff with those updates, the time it takes to strip out the baseline install stuff (some of the apps like Facebook, maps etc madly installed even on 11 pro).

I had my main server running OMV. I switched it to Win 11 Pro for ease of implementing WoL for powersaving. I use single plain disks and use snapraid for parity/redundancy (it's media updated maybe two or three times a months so snapshot then). That can do drive pooling too. LightsOut takes care of keeping the server on during media streaming.

End User Windows has a shit history with forcing updates on you and reboots just because you waited to long.

End User Windows is also not great at managing large numbers of storage drives.

They also aren't great to manage remotely.

Windows bad. Linux good. BSD better.

For real though. Windows cost money, it uses a lot of resources. And Desktop Version is missing vital parts you might want to use on a windows server like Domain Controller, DHCP, Server, Web Server, Hyper-V. Etc.

Those reasons also have most running Limix or even BSD because they are pretty lightweight especially when used headless. Also as open source they are mostly free of cost. And when you virtualize on a free and open source Hypervisor like XCP-ng or Proxmox you can run way more smaller VMs than Windows VMs as they need more resources.

Windows has more overhead, is more expensive, is less interesting/fun IMO, has poor data parity features, and has less of the homelab community’s attention than any purpose built Linux based home-lab OS. But it will definitely do the job with minimum effort from you.

You do you. If you don’t have the nous to manage a *nix based OS, go ahead and run Windows. We do this stuff for fun mate. As I’ve gotten older, I’m realising that I may as well leverage what I know to get there.

Because it is poop

TLDR: whatever setup makes you smile, and does what you need is the best setup. My only suggestion though would to use the Server versions of Windows, and not the desktop version.

Cpu Resources: yes windows has more background stuff that uses more resources, but let's not lie to ourselves - this isn't the 90s. Even a windows desktop now days runs at like 2% cpu. You got plenty left over

Memory resources: yeah windows uses more do to unneeded services, but RAM is cheap enough and easy to add.

Update reboots: windows desktop OS will automatically update and reboot by design. mS did this cause basically they were sick of their OS being called insecure , when in reality people were just not updating. There are ways to trick windows to not do this (like setting your NIC as metered), but you can't depend on that. You don't have this issue with Windows Server OS.

Storage options: windows server has a robust storage solution despite what some say here. I manage a server with around 48 drives in it with petabytes of space. Additionally it will allow you to use SMB/cifs , iscsi, and NFS shares.

So yeah... Windows costs more, and is a little more bloated.... But if you're comfortable with that trade off for ease of use, that you go for it! Ultimately in the long run you'll learn what works for you, and what doesn't - but as long as you enjoy it, and are proud of it... That's all that matters.

Forced updates and forced restarts. If you want a server that's available 24/4 that's a no no.

That's what did it for me. I started my selfhosting journey on a Windows 10 machine, I stalled Docker on it and all of my containers. Every time Windows forced an update and auto reset, I had to manually go back in, log in, spin up Docker again and every container (I now know that a lot of this can be automated but it's a lot easier to manage a Linux server now). Plus the system requirements are significantly less. The Windows OS alone takes up a chunk of your storage and RAM right off the bat.

I do have one Windows server VM because I enjoy the file system, and it doesn't do forced resets, but most of my infrastructure is made up of Linux VMs on bare metal Proxmox machines.