It's always good to see some movement in the self-hosted space but I'm wondering who is this for.

People like myself are all in and enjoy the technical aspects of running Proxmox/NixOS/Docker/Kubernetes on our own hardware, building the systems exactly as we like and (hopefully) with a sound backup strategy and without a dependency on a company providing an appliance-like experience.

Running services is not trivial and solutions like this help with getting started but not with the really hard aspects on how to operate services safely with little risk of data loss.

I'm wondering if this would be more accessible and safer to operate if instead of relying on users having their own hardware it would require users to bring their a VPS (removing the need of managing hardware) and object storage (for managed backups).

I'd really love to see an off the shelf distributed FS server in a NUC form factor that you plug in and is largely self-managed. Automatic atomic updates, QR codes to add a server to your swarm, manage it through a browser, client side encryption so a compromised server doesn't mean data exposure. If you want to get fancy, you could have user quotas so you and all your friends set up a single swarm with shared storage and you'd have a very distributed cloud. Optionally add a hetzner instance to the swarm.

All the concerns about umbrel being all proprietary are really about continuity and interoperability. We want a personal cloud where we can maintain continuity, and it needs to be, well, in some cloud that isn't your home, but also it needs to be replicated to your home (because again, continuity). Continuity in the face of:

- switching providers

- providers going bankrupt or being acquired by others who don't care

- account lockouts!

- switching device OSes

Open source means continuity and interoperability. Proprietary means the opposite.

Can it really run local LLMs at any decent size? I find it hard to believe for the price it can run anything more than 7b or 8b models slowly.

I must be missing something but $500 for an N150 mini PC pre-loaded with a 4tb nas and a custom OS is a terrible value proposition. And I have multiple form factor N1xx based machines running 24/7, so this is the exact type of thing I would be interested in. Could it have been priced in a more compelling manner without the NVME?

I would say if you're going to charge a pretty penny for the box, you have to make it ridiculously seamless to run every app the way a user wants, without issue.

TrueNAS sort of half-accomplishes this but as soon as you have to start configuring Redis and Postgres parameters to install Immich or understanding how to set permission on every layer of the filesystem so you can SMB share, the idea of a normal person being able to do this goes completely out the window.

My advice is to go ahead and just open-source everything. You won't on being closed-source anyway. You'll win on the experience for nontechnical users (or tehcnical users that don't want to spend time fiddling). You'll stomp out these complaints on Reddit and HackerNews so people don't get a bunch of negative comments when they google your company.

There's room for innovation in this space, but making a viable business here will be hard.

The enthusiast market is so wrapped up in Home Assistant and existing NAS boxes that you would need a killer app to aim first for more normie use. It looks like they tried being a crypto node at home solution and are now pivoting to be more general.

if you don't have your data when you don't have access to third parties you don't own your data.

we should start switching to solutions like this to keep control and freedom

you can find their opensource repos here: https://github.com/getumbrel

Downtime and backups is why I don't take self-hosted more seriously. If I could easily be up and running after a hardware failure or software upgrade failure, I would pay for that in a heartbeat and ditch the comparable SaaS.

As for now, I run Immich but keep Google photos around as I'm afraid to upgrade it and don't have confidence on restoring it if my server dies. See how long and full of warning messages their backup and restore page is https://docs.immich.app/administration/backup-and-restore/.

This looks really well done. The software is both well-designed (from UX / UI pov) AND it's OSS AND it's just an SSD / NAS underneath it all, I think this kind of thing is a welcome addition to the market.