So much this. I left another comment that touched on this.

I want a small reliable box that I just put in the corner and I can forget about for months at a time, as long as it provides me the services I configured it for. I access my NAS UI maybe once every 3 months.

I know exactly how to roll my own NAS (and I'm already rolling my own router), but I just don't want to deal with operating it.

Synology still scores very high on this single metric.

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exmadscientist 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Most of the other commenters do not seem to understand the difference between "low maintenance", "low maintenance by someone very skilled in the art", and "no maintenance".

Things that maintain themselves are amazing and I want more of them in my life. Anything that requires shell commands is out out out. That is for younger people.

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bonzini 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I do that for one thing: Home Assistant, because it's something that I want to customize to provide the best experience for the whole household.

Everything else, I agree and Synology has delivered enough (such a lifetime of 10+ years with full updates) that I am not really happy to try my chances with something else unless the hardware dies.

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Dylan16807 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You're being pretty vague so it's hard to respond to. But if someone suggests some version of Linux and then leaving it alone, that's no maintenance.

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exmadscientist 3 days ago | parent [-]

In my experience, unattended Linux installs tend to rot pretty badly. They're fine for a while, then either some update goes badly wrong (usually of the "well, we expected you to go from v4 to v5, but we never tested v2 to v5" variety, far down some dependency chain) and requires heroic skills to recover; or the system just point-blank refuses to update after a while, again requiring heroic skills to recover. FreeBSD has been better for me once running, but requires more work for initial setup.

So, no, my experience is that unattended Linux is not really suitable. Your experience may vary.

What I want is something that's more like an appliance than a project. You do not look at your toaster every day and wonder if it needs to perform updates. Or your washing machine. (If you do, please, seek help.) These are appliances. I want an appliance that serves me bits, lots of them, and lets me use multiple machines without caring too much which one has which file. My Synology has, to date, been excellent at that role.

	▲	Dylan16807 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> either some update goes badly wrong [...] or the system just point-blank refuses to update You don't understand, in that post I'm talking about purposefully not updating. At all. Updates can't go wrong if they don't happen. If it refuses to update then you win. > What I want is something that's more like an appliance Yeah, you get it! Set it up and then leave it alone. And don't expose it to the internet.

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TheCraiggers 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure I understand. Even a custom Arch install with samba, zfs, NFS, etc would be a "single setup, works forever" deal. It's not like what you configure is going to magically break if you don't look at it.

And security could be an issue, but it's not like Synology is any better there with their old as dirt dependencies.

Snark aside, TrueNas is probably your best bet. Maybe Unraid? Still, with all of these, it's not like they require constant attention to operate.

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plqbfbv 5 days ago | parent [-]

A custom Arch install is what I have on my router.

There's no real auto-update for Arch, and it wasn't designed for it (IIRC according to their forums/wiki), so I have to login every now and then and run pacman (I'll admit I haven't invested more than a couple hours searching).

The `kea` package (DHCP server) got updates this summer, 3 weeks apart, that both broke configuration file parsing, and I had to discover the next day on reboot. "But you should have read the changelog!", "But you should have tested the config files on updates!", "But you should have restarted the service!" ...: no, no I don't normally test every config file or restart every service after an upgrade, and I don't normally read Changelogs of all software installed on my machines. I shouldn't have to do that in 2025.

`zfs` is out of kernel, I've dabbled with that for a while until I understood if you want your machine to reboot 100% of the times, you'd better stick with in-kernel filesystems, no matter how worse featureset they have.

Sometimes stuff will just break on package upgrades without notice or warning, and you're left to pick up the pieces, normally in a hurry because your partner is screaming at you.

Compare that with Synology, where I have never, ever needed to login to click "run updates" or put it in "maintenance mode" to fix it. It updates itself, it boots at the set time, it brings up all services, runs periodic scrubbing, informs me via mail, shuts down at the specified time. It has a 2x-SSD mirror for cache, and I don't need to care about the disk layout and configuration, and the cache configuration, .....

It's literally a set-and-forget auto-upgrading box that I can just use instead of maintain.

I understand that Synology is not in good shape anymore, see my other top-comment :)

	▲	Dylan16807 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What I get from this is to stay very far away from Arch if I want to update regularly and not fuss with it. But that's not an indictment of distros designed to be stable. And your experience of Arch with automatic updates is very different from their semi-suggestion of Arch with no updates. As for ZFS, I don't use it for root, in part so that even when I mess with things I know it'll boot fine. But that only applies to root.
	▲	JonChesterfield 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Turns out building zfs into the kernel is very easy, if you happen to be building the kernel for some other reason already.