Worth noting that TrueNAS recently stopped publishing their build scripts, intentionally making it harder to build their open source code.[0]

[0] https://forums.truenas.com/t/clearing-the-air-on-build-scrip...

In ~2017 I ditched FreeNAS when my FreeNAS Mini died from the Atom C2000 hardware failure. iXSystems was great about getting me a replacement board, but I decided when I rebuilt the system to just use FreeBSD and get used to command-line only administration. That directly lead to me learning pf, jails, bhyve, etc. Yeah, I don't have any fancy web UI, but I've had a rock solid system for almost 10 years with Samba + NFS running without issue.

What a shame I didn't discover this sooner -- I finally sent my 11-year-old TrueNAS system[1] through the one-way Linux door about a year ago because I gave up on any hope that something like this would come along and I didn't see another way to keep it current.

The migration path went smoothly but I preferred the FreeBSD setup if only because it forced me to do something a bit more interesting in my spare time. I do quite a lot of Linux work in my day job and it was nice to occasionally work on something that was surface-level similar but subtly and not-so-subtly different.

[1] Over 11 years I have replaced every component (even the CPU/motherboard) at least once except for the case. Migrating from MBR to UEFI was "fun".

Why does anyone bother with these ephemeral meme distros when you can accomplish the same with vanilla FreeBSD/Illumos/Linux using standard commands and documentation?

If you need your hand held to file share, that's why Windows Server still exists and is the gold standard for SMB.

There's also bsdnas: https://bsdnas.com

I used TrueNAS in the past but last touched it several years ago.

I gather now there are two flavors: CORE which continues to use FreeBSD under the hood, and SCALE (aka Community Edition) which is based on Debian Linux. If I understand correctly, the former is only receiving security and stability updates, and iXsystems is developing all new features only on SCALE.

If you were to install fresh today, would you prefer this (FreeCORE), BSDnas, or the official SCALE version - and why?

No MacOS clients, so don't need SMB Spotlight.

I did the migration to Linux and it actually was painless. I didn't really notice any degradation or hiccups in any way. But I guess this is a good option if FreeBSD is important to you.

AT first I was very confused, then I realized that this is building on TrueNAS CORE, and not TrueNAS SCALE. Makes much more sense now!

Who is behind this? I've been burned once with nas, and I watched the long Plex to Jellyfin saga. What assurance do I have that this will continue to be developed and will become good?

Thank you, you made my day 100% better

oh man, just as I upgraded to the debian TrueNAS

Is this just butt hurt BSD users not wanting to use Linux as the base of TrueNAS?

This seems nice. FreeBSD always seemed nicer than Linux, though now that Linux is being developed by LLMs and Torvalds is vibe-coding, I wonder if they'll be able to keep up.