yeah see here’s the thing: I don’t know what samba is and I’ve never “written” a webpage in my life, simple or no. A lot of people tell me “just use CLI, it’s better!” But “better” usually ends up meaning “you have more control over all these little options that you never use!” I just don’t get it. I watched TechnoDadLife do a side-by-side of OMV and CasaOS, and he was done with CasaOS setup in less than 2 minutes… OMV took a ton of customization, settings, plugin & terminal downloads, configs… nightmare. He says “if youre just managing media, use CasaOS or similar.” and I have yet to see a better argument for CLI/pure headless. It seems a bit elitist hacker gatekeepy to me. Everyone always says “whatever works for you, but that thing that works for you is worse.” for no real discernible benefit that I can understand.

Hey look at that, he has a video about Umbrel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwbjY1mqKvk

Awesome, thanks. Also anyone going under “TechnoDadLife” has a laser pointed right at me, marketing-wise.

Man, when I looked at the prox mox in action videos I got dizzy - so much stufffff! What would you say are the biggest advantages? It seems like it would be more of a project to take on…

Thanks so much for the detailed reply. It’s great to hear from you (n others) that the “GUI” style can be easily accomplished without relying on either of these. I will look into Open Media Vault and Portainer as you and others have suggested. Very cool abt AudiobookShelf-- I was manuallyy downloading my audiobooks to my phone. I should look into something like you have.

Cool! Warts and all, I did have a pretty positive experience with CasaOS, esp as a beginner to both linux and selfhosting at the same time, it really helped me understand things, and of course, now it’s familiar… it would be very cool to have that familiarity, but actively managed… because there are also lots of bugs/half-assed features in casaOS. Thanks.

That’s the thing… I can’t find much on them, other than that it all started as a crypto platform, but evolved beyond that, it’s surprsing how little I know about it… Someone just suggested it as a more “active project” that works a lot like CasaOS… seems like they’re trying to sell an “easy, pre-packaged” home server, which is a neat idea for non-tech savvy types who want to own & unsubscribe… butttttt what OS even is this? Is this a custom linux distro? Is it just a gui running on top? It’s hard to figure out exactly what their “os” really is.

what is enshittifying? is it monetization? Is Portainer a paid app/service?

why, though. how is it easier?

also you say CLI is better, but you don’t say why at all.

OK, what is “a startpage for them with links” is that a service or do you mean create a webpage? I mean, most of what my non CLI users want to do is move/edit files. Like when you get a russian lang only file, or .exe malware… they just need to delete/move things sometimes. I don’t know how a startpage helps that.