this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Why is Unraid popular in the self-hosting community ? (jlai.lu)
submitted 8 months ago by KaKi87@jlai.lu to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
76 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It's proprietary, after all. I understand paid is fine, but even then, it usually better be open source.

So, why is Unraid an exception ?

Thanks

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[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 21 points 8 months ago (2 children)

They had the right product at the right time. No other free or paid alternative was that user friendly in allowing laymen in mixing and matching multiple disks and having redundancy

Doing that with pure Linux command line at the time it was inconceivable for 99% of users (at most a raid1 with mdadm over two drives could be easily attained) and windows home server initially was an alternative but Microsoft was completely misguided and "improvements" in Windows home server 2 completely killed it

Then they added docker support and it was even easier to self host everything.

But if they tried to launch today, with how mature are free alternatives, they would never reach critical mass adoption to be sustainable.

For example, I don't think that the paid fork of truenas that LTT has economically backed is going to be successful

[–] Wispy2891@lemmy.world 13 points 8 months ago

As an user that paid for windows home server, why windows home server 2(011) was a complete failure

  1. Updating to whs2 required a full wipe - unacceptable by everyone
  2. Updating to whs2 required to pay full price and not upgrade price - lol
  3. The system drive wasn't covered by redundancy and you would lose all the settings if the drive died
  4. The data drives also couldn't get any kind of redundancy as they REMOVED the feature from the server and moved it to clients! What the fuck? It was the main selling point! Easy raid for everyone. What's the purpose of the "home server" if it couldn't pool drives, while the clients with Windows 8 home instead could set a massive, redundant, pool of 10 drives???
  5. They removed the useful feature that backed up automatically all the windows computers in the network
  6. They removed the basic features like the media gallery and such, to see that you would need windows media center... but 6 years after they killed windows media center
[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 8 months ago

For example, I don't think that the paid fork of truenas that LTT has economically backed is going to be successful

Maybe not in the short term.
But he mentions them on every ocassion they'd use TrueNAS that doesnt require advanced configuration.

And it really is just a pretty frontend with some additional features.
So I don't see why it can't be successful (except for too high prices)