You’ve mistakenly conflated the Self Hosted community with the FOSS community. There is a lot of overlap in interests between the two, but the venn diagram of those communities are not at all a circle. UnRAID isn’t an exception to self hosting, it’s a textbook example of selfhosting.

It’s a similar thing with the SH community and HomeLabbing. All home labs are selfhosted obviously, but home labs are sandboxes for learning, testing and prototyping. A raspberry pi that runs one service your home depends on that you don’t tinker with outside of updates isn’t a home lab.

It’s less hassle than maintaining my homelab was when I used Ubuntu server. Just because I can do it the “hard way”, doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy easy mode and not having to do much of anything.

They give you exactly what they promise with zero enshitification. It’s a solid product and was worth it to me to buy, just for the convenience.

Decent UI. Affordable lifetime pricing. Actually just-works. No retrospective enshittification. Free trial is actually free, not ad supported.

You get what you pay for, and you're not the product.

Some don't care much about the license. Like how many people run Xpenology (hacked synology dsm) or Plex or stuff like that.

If I've learned anything in the 30 odd years homelabing and running a SaaS application, it's that you need to learn the basics of the command line. That will help you master running anything on a nix server.

But must new homelabers are only able to use a gui, so unraid is the best way to get into running stuff with the least effort.

I keep thinking a homelab 101 course would help those new to homelabing get going without a gui.

The big thing is very easily mix and match different sizes of disks. ZFS as of recently can sort of do that, but its not as efficient.

Unraid is easy to start with when you have no idea what you're doing. Other stuff often requires more up front work to setup.

The paid licence is just the cost of the conveniences.

Has a nice UI, let's me mix and match disks, let's me host docker containers plus a VM with gpu pass through.

All basically out of the box. (Ok - Pass through was a bastard) All for a one off price.

I don't know if there are other options that let me do all of that, unraid has always been the one mentioned.