Umbrel – Personal Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#121

Post by skrtskrt » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 7:27 PM UTC

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.

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#122

Post by bastawhiz » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 8:30 PM UTC

singpolyma3 wrote: post #77

bastawhiz wrote: post #64

I am uninterested in purchasing proprietary hardware running a proprietary operating system that'll work (maybe) for some amount of time. Sure, it's technically self hosted. But you can't extend it (without their proprietary app store). It doesn't seem like you can write your own apps without registering, or side load them. Details are extremely thin on the site, so let me know if I'm wrong. Hell, all the compelling…

In what way is the proprietary? It looks to be just a PC box running OSS apps?

Can you hack it? Can you install apps without using their app store? Where is the documentation?

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#123

Post by doubled112 » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 10:21 PM UTC

zikduruqe wrote: post #106

doubled112 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? Half of the IT team I am on is seemingly incapable of understanding using a public/private keypair for SSH logins. Can I use yours? How to copy them? Should they be unique per user? Should I email the private key? Etc?

> Ect? My favorite is when someone posts their private key to a Slack or Teams channel, then says "I'll just delete it after it is received..." No. Just no. That key is forever unclean.

Hey, I accidentally created this instance with your key, will you send it to me?

No…

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#124

Post by seec » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 12:05 PM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #58

pedrozieg wrote: post #12

A decade of “personal cloud box” attempts has shown that the hard part isn’t the hardware, it’s the long-term social contract. Synology/WD/My Cloud/etc all eventually hit the same wall: once the company pivots or dies, you’re left with a sealed brick that you don’t fully control, holding the most irreplaceable thing you own: your data. If you’re going to charge an Apple-like premium on commodity mini-PC hardware, you…

Don't forget the user experience needs to be seamless. We bubble ourselves to this as tech fluent folks on HN, but the seamless quality needs to be on par or better with Google Drive, iCloud drive, Google / iCloud Photos etc. Ability to share, good default security, and seamless integration with the things people care about. If this device can't automatically backup a phone wirelessly and without my interaction, it w…

There is no way to properly make money from fully open protocols. If you do the hard work of research and development, your competitors can just take the work and sell their implementation minus the R&D costs, undercutting you. It's not sustainable.

It's basically what Apple learned during the Macintosh clones era. Churning out countless units of the same stuff isn't that complicated once you have figured out what needs to be copied. Getting the worth-copying state is the hard and expensive part; nobody is going to do it for free.

This can readily be seen in the "free" open-source software world. The vast majority of it is just lower-quality copies of existing software.

Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud

#125

Post by SansGuidon » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:16 PM UTC

cess11 wrote: post #119

SansGuidon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proxmox = infra. You run ops. Cloudron = platform. Ops is mostly done. Clicking apps is easy. Maintaining them isn’t.

Right, but with helper-scripts "ops is mostly done" on Proxmox too. You just point at them and perhaps follow some instructions and that's it.

Helper scripts automate day 0. Cloudron automates day 2+.

Install ≠ operate