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Recommend a distro for a just-works NAS/self hosting machine?
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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linux4noobs
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The reason that I was favoring Greyhole over ZFS is that I want to assemble a large, redundant storage volume out of a bunch of mismatched old disks and swap them out as they fill up or fail. I know it is very possible to do it with ZFS, but it seemed to not be the general use case and complicated.
Using unreliable hardware seems at odds with your "just want it to work" requirement.
Yes, but perfectly reliable hardware is impossible and every small gain in reliability drastically increases the price. Luckily, most hardware can be "fixed" by replacing the malfunctioning part. The only part that is not easy to replace is hard drives. For data disks, I have guides giving me step by step institutions on how to rebuild off of replicas. With the OS disk, I am depending on hopes and taking notes while installing.
Broken software is tricker to replace. I can uninstall and reinstall it, but I have to be careful to avoid catastrophic data loss. Also, broken software generally means a bad release, so I have to revert and periodically upgrade/revert to check if the issue has been resolved. And running old versions of one part of the system can cause incompatibility in other parts.
Your os disks should be raid 1. I'd recommend a pair of onboard nvme or cheap ssds for OS. That's the part you don't want to be fighting with if something does go wrong.
It's trivial to replace a drive on zfs if one fails.
Hardware and software are both really reliable these days. If you're running something like proxmox then you also get easy snapshots and rollbacks.