{"slug": "truenas", "name": "TrueNAS", "category": "os", "category_name": "Operating systems and desktop", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 16, "warners": 4, "score": 1.463, "rising": -0.98, "first": "2025-11-27", "latest": "2026-10-23", "why": "TrueNAS has been pretty good so far, been running this for many years already.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 10, "compare": 0, "warn": 4}, "spark": [1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "TrueNAS has been pretty good so far, been running this for many years already.", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.truenas.com", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["TrueNAS"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 756930512, "item_id": 47308157, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308157", "by": "ErneX", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "TrueNAS has been pretty good so far, been running this for many years already.", "excerpt": "I run (among many other VMs) TrueNAS on a VM of an xcp-ng host (Supermicro board with a Xeon and ECC ram). Passing a dedicated SAS controller to it. Before that I was using esxi but migrated all my VMs and hosts to xcp-ng. TrueNAS has been pretty good so far, been running this for many years already. I also have another xcp-ng host for other VMs running on a Dell OptiPlex Micro. OP should configure DNS locally and re", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "NAS in VM", "switched_from": "", "story": "My Homelab Setup"}, {"id": 749611424, "item_id": 46850714, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850714", "by": "nodesocket", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use TrueNAS as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs running Tahoe. Seems to work fine", "excerpt": "I use TrueNAS as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs running Tahoe. Seems to work fine with no local configuration changes. Just make sure in SMB global configuration you: - Enable Apple SMB2/3 Protocol Extensions And when creating the SMB share select Time Machine for purpose.", "context": "", "use_case": "Time Machine backup target", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 737614430, "item_id": 46100901, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46100901", "by": "auxym", "date": "2025-11-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I am grateful for Truenas, Jellyfin and pihole.", "excerpt": "Scoop (https://scoop.sh/), a package manager for windows that is essential to make Windows usable for me. Sourcegit is my new favorite git client. Git in general, of course. Linux and also the people behind RT_PREEMPT, I am excited to see it merged into mainline this year. KDE has been my favorite DE for years and I use many of their apps too, such as Kate. Thanks to everyone contributing to the KDE project. The enti", "context": "", "use_case": "home NAS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What open source projects are you grateful for?"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 791934432, "item_id": 49495902, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495902", "by": "teruakohatu", "date": "2026-08-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "which is now having some of the source pulled", "excerpt": "> \"Won't do free labour for our commercial enterprise to profit off of forever\" is a rug pull now? It's incredible that you can type these words with a straight face. I explicitly stated in my comment that we pay for open source (via vendor support). That is not the issue. It is now a common business strategy to commercialise an open source project. FreeNAS was commercialised as TrueNAS, which is now having some of t", "context": "", "use_case": "NAS", "switched_from": "", "story": "FreeCORE TrueNAS Core \u2013 Continued"}, {"id": 778889409, "item_id": 48680588, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48680588", "by": "whalesalad", "date": "2026-06-25", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It really is a locked-down appliance. Good luck installing custom software on the base OS.", "excerpt": "I haven't abandoned Proxmox yet, but the take here resonates with me. I do not like configuring appliances. I prefer defining infra as code, having that diffable, assertable, etc. I have had pretty good luck managing Proxmox clusters with the Proxmox API (https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/api-viewer/index.html) or just letting the agent shell in as root (lol). I built a very simple provisioning tool called vmfactory t", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "NAS", "switched_from": "TrueNAS", "story": "Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus"}, {"id": 757097776, "item_id": 47318611, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47318611", "by": "ikkun", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I decided to stay away from truenas for my recent nas build precisely because it smelled of enshittification", "excerpt": "related reddit comment from what seems to be \"Senior Vice President Of Engineering at TrueNAS\": https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/1rpdjb2/comment/o9ksdee/?context=1 > But I'd wager 99% of the folks commenting on this thread have never done a build from source before, nor would ever want to? what an insensitive comment this is to anyone that has contributed. are they really saying \"the source is available but ", "context": "", "use_case": "NAS", "switched_from": "", "story": "TrueNAS build system going closed source"}, {"id": 754373170, "item_id": 47148323, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47148323", "by": "csomaratne", "date": "2026-02-24", "stance": "warn", "quote": "they all felt like they traded 'easy UI' for the ability to actually keep the stack in tune", "excerpt": "I spent years hacking around the limitations of proprietary NAS OSs (QTS/QuTS) on my QNAP hardware. After dropping $1500 on a new TS-873A only to find that even with ZFS, I was stuck with 3-minute boot times and black-box abstractions that broke my optimizations, I hit a wall. I tried the usual suspects\u2014TrueNAS, OMV, ZimaOS\u2014but they all felt like they traded 'easy UI' for the ability to actually keep the stack in tun", "context": "", "use_case": "NAS OS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Seeking 5 alpha testers for Sovereign Stack, an AGPLv3 bare-metal NAS OS"}]}], "who": [{"by": "ProllyInfamous", "context": "Began learning ZFS two weeks ago", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50214855", "date": "2026-10-23"}, {"by": "jherskovic", "context": "local-first backups at home", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914426", "date": "2026-07-14"}, {"by": "snapplebobapple", "context": "home lab", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48881546", "date": "2026-07-12"}, {"by": "bhouston", "context": "runs a TrueNAS server with 128GB RAM and 10G ethernet", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587290", "date": "2026-06-18"}, {"by": "ErneX", "context": "homelab user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308157", "date": "2026-03-09"}, {"by": "paffdragon", "context": "Synology user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46914024", "date": "2026-02-06"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["nas", "home nas", "nas os", "home storage", "nas with metrics monitoring", "nas operating system"], "compared": [{"slug": "proxmox", "name": "Proxmox", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "zfs", "name": "ZFS", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "time-machine", "name": "Time Machine", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180257", "title": "Show HN: Uberblok \u2013 an interactive museum of ZFS internals", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49985548", "title": "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49877097", "title": "item 49877097", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49776960", "title": "Custom home server built from spare parts", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494856", "title": "FreeCORE TrueNAS Core \u2013 Continued", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986091", "title": "Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 3}, "2026-08": {"warn": 1}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 2}}, "quotes": [{"id": 803437681, "item_id": 50214855, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50214855", "by": "ProllyInfamous", "date": "2026-10-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I began learning ZFS (TrueNAS and the macOS-plugin)", "excerpt": "I began learning ZFS (TrueNAS and the macOS-plugin) just two weeks ago. It is absolutely incredible technology. >I use it with ... most of my external disks with macOS How do you personally deal with the terrible macOS default SAMBA client (if using SMB shares)? I can get saturated single-file transfers, but even deleting 100+ small files takes a longgggggg time. It is my understanding the the macOS only allows singl", "context": "Began learning ZFS two weeks ago", "use_case": "NAS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Uberblok \u2013 an interactive museum of ZFS internals"}, {"id": 800266976, "item_id": 50016686, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50016686", "by": "dada216", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "At home: truenas and gitlab.", "excerpt": "Hosted in a cloud: a VPN Lowendtalk Is an amazing community to get offers for those. At home: truenas and gitlab. At home, for work: I have an older HP workstation with an older Xeon with 24 physical cores and it runs a rhel (I have them for free as a partner) and I use it to run VMs for experiments and replicating infras, K8S, Windows AD stuff, etc.", "context": "", "use_case": "home storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"}, {"id": 798033568, "item_id": 49877098, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49877098", "by": "bleevht", "date": "2026-09-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I connected my TrueNAS box to Graphite and Grafana.", "excerpt": "I connected my TrueNAS box to Graphite and Grafana. I had both of these running in a Talos Kubernetes cluster. The metrics were sent over correctly, but the imported dashboard I was using from the Grafana community showed no data because it expected older TrueNAS metric paths. So, I got this fixed after remapping the panels. Then, I found another issue. It interpreted an ARC value in bytes as megabytes and displayed ", "context": "", "use_case": "NAS with metrics monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 796500562, "item_id": 49781285, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781285", "by": "fghorow", "date": "2026-09-20", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "if you insist on running TrueNAS (or whatever) just stash it in a container or KVM box.", "excerpt": "Check out proxmox. Debian base with Debian apt repos available for standard stuff, with ZFS built into their kernels. Easy to install. And, if you insist on running TrueNAS (or whatever) just stash it in a container or KVM box. (Edited to add: I forgot! ZFS on root available from the installer -- encrypted even if that's your jam.)", "context": "", "use_case": "NAS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Custom home server built from spare parts"}, {"id": 791934432, "item_id": 49495902, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495902", "by": "teruakohatu", "date": "2026-08-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "which is now having some of the source pulled", "excerpt": "> \"Won't do free labour for our commercial enterprise to profit off of forever\" is a rug pull now? It's incredible that you can type these words with a straight face. I explicitly stated in my comment that we pay for open source (via vendor support). That is not the issue. It is now a common business strategy to commercialise an open source project. FreeNAS was commercialised as TrueNAS, which is now having some of t", "context": "", "use_case": "NAS", "switched_from": "", "story": "FreeCORE TrueNAS Core \u2013 Continued"}, {"id": 783811745, "item_id": 48988234, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48988234", "by": "exogenousdata", "date": "2026-07-20", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I recently installed Plex on my TruNAS.", "excerpt": "Not sure of your issues or when you last tried. I recently installed Plex on my TruNAS. I use the AppleTV app and it works well. One caveat is that older AppleTVs can\u2019t do native decoding of some mkvs. But that\u2019s largely an AppleTV limitation. Though I could imagine the client being smart enough to list its abilities and the server only serving content supported by the client.", "context": "", "use_case": "NAS operating system", "switched_from": "", "story": "Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team"}, {"id": 782630816, "item_id": 48914426, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48914426", "by": "jherskovic", "date": "2026-07-14", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Have a TrueNAS server at home with a bunch of drives in a RAID-Z array.", "excerpt": "Have a TrueNAS server at home with a bunch of drives in a RAID-Z array. Backups go there. My pictures, which are probably my single most important item, are also there but get cross-backed up to a very good friend\u2019s NAS in a different city. And his to mine. My wife\u2019s backups also go on BackBlaze because she would be much, much, much less tolerant of a local glitch than I would. TL;DR local-first backups here. Time Ma", "context": "local-first backups at home", "use_case": "home backups NAS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft deleted my account and OneDrive"}, {"id": 782104740, "item_id": 48881546, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48881546", "by": "snapplebobapple", "date": "2026-07-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "As truenas apps for rustfs/garagefs.", "excerpt": "I think it's those small writes that was making garagefs perform so badly and rustfs perform a lot better. My setup sounds like a different scale than yours though. It's my home lab running on questionable hardware. As truenas apps for rustfs/garagefs. I use cephfs on my proxmox cluster and it's honestly not that great if you have a lot of small files either (which I do because of things like screenshots in jellyfin/", "context": "home lab", "use_case": "NAS apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "ZeroFS vs. Amazon S3 Files"}, {"id": 778889409, "item_id": 48680588, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48680588", "by": "whalesalad", "date": "2026-06-25", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It really is a locked-down appliance. Good luck installing custom software on the base OS.", "excerpt": "I haven't abandoned Proxmox yet, but the take here resonates with me. I do not like configuring appliances. I prefer defining infra as code, having that diffable, assertable, etc. I have had pretty good luck managing Proxmox clusters with the Proxmox API (https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/api-viewer/index.html) or just letting the agent shell in as root (lol). I built a very simple provisioning tool called vmfactory t", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "NAS", "switched_from": "TrueNAS", "story": "Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus"}, {"id": 777396640, "item_id": 48587290, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48587290", "by": "bhouston", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've had the hardest time making my TrueNAS ZFS server fast when it was filled with HDD spinning disks.", "excerpt": "> \"Dual 25 Gigabit SFP28 ports and redundant power supplies for resilience\" Can you actually saturate the links with the spinning drives? I've had the hardest time making my TrueNAS ZFS server fast when it was filled with HDD spinning disks. I initially also had 12 of them trying to get maximum speed. I have 128GB RAM and a 10G ethernet connection. I tried all types of optimizations like L2ARC via NVMe, etc, and it w", "context": "runs a TrueNAS server with 128GB RAM and 10G ethernet", "use_case": "home NAS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS"}, {"id": 757097776, "item_id": 47318611, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47318611", "by": "ikkun", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I decided to stay away from truenas for my recent nas build precisely because it smelled of enshittification", "excerpt": "related reddit comment from what seems to be \"Senior Vice President Of Engineering at TrueNAS\": https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/1rpdjb2/comment/o9ksdee/?context=1 > But I'd wager 99% of the folks commenting on this thread have never done a build from source before, nor would ever want to? what an insensitive comment this is to anyone that has contributed. are they really saying \"the source is available but ", "context": "", "use_case": "NAS", "switched_from": "", "story": "TrueNAS build system going closed source"}, {"id": 756930512, "item_id": 47308157, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308157", "by": "ErneX", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "TrueNAS has been pretty good so far, been running this for many years already.", "excerpt": "I run (among many other VMs) TrueNAS on a VM of an xcp-ng host (Supermicro board with a Xeon and ECC ram). Passing a dedicated SAS controller to it. Before that I was using esxi but migrated all my VMs and hosts to xcp-ng. TrueNAS has been pretty good so far, been running this for many years already. I also have another xcp-ng host for other VMs running on a Dell OptiPlex Micro. OP should configure DNS locally and re", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "NAS in VM", "switched_from": "", "story": "My Homelab Setup"}, {"id": 754373170, "item_id": 47148323, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47148323", "by": "csomaratne", "date": "2026-02-24", "stance": "warn", "quote": "they all felt like they traded 'easy UI' for the ability to actually keep the stack in tune", "excerpt": "I spent years hacking around the limitations of proprietary NAS OSs (QTS/QuTS) on my QNAP hardware. After dropping $1500 on a new TS-873A only to find that even with ZFS, I was stuck with 3-minute boot times and black-box abstractions that broke my optimizations, I hit a wall. I tried the usual suspects\u2014TrueNAS, OMV, ZimaOS\u2014but they all felt like they traded 'easy UI' for the ability to actually keep the stack in tun", "context": "", "use_case": "NAS OS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Seeking 5 alpha testers for Sovereign Stack, an AGPLv3 bare-metal NAS OS"}, {"id": 750624385, "item_id": 46914024, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46914024", "by": "paffdragon", "date": "2026-02-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I might give TrueNAS a try", "excerpt": "I belive even for gluetun I had to add the WG kernel module. I think I used this to compile it for myself https://github.com/runfalk/synology-wireguard I know there are userspace implementations, but can't remember the specifics rn and don't have my notes with me. > kernel modules for iptables-nft I think you meant nftables. The iptables-nft package is meant to provide iptables interface for nftables for code that st", "context": "Synology user", "use_case": "NAS OS", "switched_from": "", "story": "When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown"}, {"id": 749611424, "item_id": 46850714, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850714", "by": "nodesocket", "date": "2026-02-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use TrueNAS as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs running Tahoe. Seems to work fine", "excerpt": "I use TrueNAS as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs running Tahoe. Seems to work fine with no local configuration changes. Just make sure in SMB global configuration you: - Enable Apple SMB2/3 Protocol Extensions And when creating the SMB share select Time Machine for purpose.", "context": "", "use_case": "Time Machine backup target", "switched_from": "", "story": "TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe"}, {"id": 737614430, "item_id": 46100901, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46100901", "by": "auxym", "date": "2025-11-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I am grateful for Truenas, Jellyfin and pihole.", "excerpt": "Scoop (https://scoop.sh/), a package manager for windows that is essential to make Windows usable for me. Sourcegit is my new favorite git client. Git in general, of course. Linux and also the people behind RT_PREEMPT, I am excited to see it merged into mainline this year. KDE has been my favorite DE for years and I use many of their apps too, such as Kate. Thanks to everyone contributing to the KDE project. The enti", "context": "", "use_case": "home NAS", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What open source projects are you grateful for?"}, {"id": 737201680, "item_id": 46075105, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46075105", "by": "bhouston", "date": "2025-11-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I recently switched my TrueNAS setup from a bunch of HDDs to a 8 NVMes", "excerpt": "Nice design! I recently switched my TrueNAS setup from a bunch of HDDs to a 8 NVMes (with an HHD volume now as only long-term \"offline\" archiving.) No more trying to optimize the system to get 10G speeds, it just is crazy fast, no matter what type of tasks I do. I haven't yet switched from my massive case yet though - I am not sure there is DYI cases that can handle 8 NVMes yet, but it is the future.", "context": "", "use_case": "NAS", "switched_from": "", "story": "DIY NAS: 2026 Edition"}]}