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TrueNAS Core: Soft EOL

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Re: TrueNAS Core: Soft EOL

#2
TrueNAS is the FreeBSD NAS appliance thing. ZFS with easy setup, a GUI etc.

This announcement is that they're abandoning that project, replacing it with a version called "Scale", which if you go looking turns out to be Debian.

Bad news for FreeBSD really. I'm sad to hear it but then I also dropped FreeBSD with ZFS for Debian a couple of years ago so I can't really judge the company for the decision.

Re: TrueNAS Core: Soft EOL

#3

TrueNAS is the FreeBSD NAS appliance thing. ZFS with easy setup, a GUI etc. This announcement is that they're abandoning that project, replacing it with a version called "Scale", which if you go looking turns out to be Debian. Bad news for FreeBSD really. I'm sad to hear it but then I also dropped FreeBSD with ZFS for Debian a couple of years ago so I can't really judge the company for the decision.

More appropriately slowly sunsetting it because the alternate flavour is seeing growth and the FreeBSD flavour is becoming non-viable.

> The data is showing us that CORE will become non-viable at some point in the future. Without divulging too much, I can say that SCALE is seeing roughly a 5x growth rate compared to CORE and we don't see any reason for that trend to reverse.

CORE (aka FreeBSD) will still get maintenance releases for the foreseeable future. If you are really bothered about it, crowd fund a few developers to continue the project, I'm sure they won't mind. Otherwise, it seems like SCALE or death for them.

Re: TrueNAS Core: Soft EOL

#4
I built a truenas server last December and I was hesitating between core and scale. I went with scale since I have been using debian for a while and never saw any reason to switch away from it. Glad I did.

Re: TrueNAS Core: Soft EOL

#5
(This is from december and was covered in various places then)

SCALE was always the main future - that has been totally obvious to all customers at this point. It was also obvious there would be some point they were going to either merge them or maintenance mode Core.

Part of this seems like there are people think that "no new features = EOL", whereas it's usually "you get nothing = EOL".

ixSystems is basically guaranteeing support for Core until the users disappear, which is all someone should expect here.

Unlike most companies, TrueNAS has published roadmaps and the bugs associated with features on those roadmaps. See here: https://www.truenas.com/docs/truenasupgrades/ They are pretty clear about everything, and you can see there are no major version upgrades planned for Core and haven't been for a while - just another stable release.

Overall this just feels like "Some people are upset that they wanted to believe ixSystems was going to develop two completely separate products forever, one which used their preferred OS, despite all available evidence to the contrary".

ixSystems has been clear they will support Core until the userbase isn't worth it anymore. Some people seem to have confuesd support with "innovate and move forward".

Re: TrueNAS Core: Soft EOL

#6
A year or two ago I moved my outdated Proxmox server over to TrueNAS Core because I was getting more into the BSDs and liked the idea of "less controversial" ZFS support.

Sadly it did feel clunkier in many ways (my Unifi Jail sometimes fails with a vague error message, CPU temp sensors are inaccurate, SMB share auth is a pain), although stability has been rock solid.

I'll be moving back to Proxmox when I rebuild and upgrade disks. It's a shame that a company that was at the forefront of BSD development has decided to move away from it.

Re: TrueNAS Core: Soft EOL

#8
As a neophyte to the server/homelab world, why do people have such strong feelings about FreeBSD vs Linux? To me they seem to accomplish much the same things in much the same ways, although my only experience with a BSD like system is MacOS. Am I missing something crucial here?

Re: TrueNAS Core: Soft EOL

#9
post #8

As a neophyte to the server/homelab world, why do people have such strong feelings about FreeBSD vs Linux? To me they seem to accomplish much the same things in much the same ways, although my only experience with a BSD like system is MacOS. Am I missing something crucial here?

It's just two different ways to accomplish it. To pick a charged example purely for effect; this is akin to asking why do Republicans and Democrats have such strong feelings on governing the country? Most people are centrists and most people want similar means to get the same outcome for the country.

Re: TrueNAS Core: Soft EOL

#10

A year or two ago I moved my outdated Proxmox server over to TrueNAS Core because I was getting more into the BSDs and liked the idea of "less controversial" ZFS support. Sadly it did feel clunkier in many ways (my Unifi Jail sometimes fails with a vague error message, CPU temp sensors are inaccurate, SMB share auth is a pain), although stability has been rock solid. I'll be moving back to Proxmox when I rebuild and…

Jail-based plugins were always half baked and brittle on Core back to when it was still called FreeNAS. Updates seemed to require complicated manual intervention every time and trying to do it through the UI was a death sentence. Scale is attempting to streamline it with container/Kubernetes-based plugins. It's got some rough edges and growing pains, but in my experience so far it has still been an improvement for me even if I liked the simplicity of jails more.

Proxmox is a better platform if you wanna run a fleet of custom VMs etc, but Scale is doing interesting things if your use case is more "plugin"-like. I use both.

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