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I had a bit of a hiccup with my Unraid server. It wouldn’t turn on, and I got so fed up that I decided to get rid of it. But now, I’m back on the hunt for a new home server OS, and I’m hoping to find one that’s easy to use and has a GUI. If you were in my shoes in 2025, which one would you pick?
Been impressed with Proxmox, super versatile.
What are your thoughts on something like Zimaos and Cosmos Cloud?
I don't know them so I can't say much. Personally I'm wary if there's too much "magic" involved, tools that have automated everything usually are easy to get going, but often tracking down issues is more complicated as they add another layer where the error can come from. But as I said I don't know these so I can't say much about them.
I really like the concept of Proxmox; however, it’s not for my use case. Mainly running a media server. As you have mentioned, I’m also sceptical about plug-and-play OS. 😅 I just can’t make up my mind.
If you just want to install some apps directly on the server, I'd just go with Debian headless and set up docker, if you like with portainer or some similar GUI.
I'm still a noob but I have been shocked at how easy Cosmos Cloud has been to set up compared to my old docker/portainer/nginx architecture. Things just work with minimal to no troubleshooting
Thanks for the recommendation. It’s looking pretty interesting. I’m surprised I haven’t heard about it until now. How’s your experience overall? What other OS’s have you tried? I’ve tried Proxmox, then TrueNAS, but I settled on Unraid. (The Unraid server died on me. When I turned it on, I couldn’t access the web UI. Sometimes, when I press the power button, it doesn’t turn on. )
Now that I bought different hardware for the cosmos server and my Pi is free I should check out proxmox and unraid though just to compare
I haven't tried any of those honestly. My previous setup was just a Raspberry Pi running docker with portainer GUI, and nginx pointing to one service. It took me at least a month of dealing with errors, and I got burned out when I could never get geo-blocking or fail2ban working.
I stumbled across Cosmos when the dev posted about 0.16 release and the main draw for me was integrated reverse proxy, geo-blocking, anti-bot/ddos, and automatic updates. I have only run into a few hiccups setting it up and the discord is pretty active so my issues had either been solved before or someone answered me quick
While reviewing Cosmos yesterday, I stumbled upon another operating system called ZimaOS. It’s also pretty interesting.
Lot of reinventing the wheel going on there. I will be interested to see how it matures.
What are they reinventing the wheel from, proxmox or something like that? I should take a peek at something else just to see how they compare
Just looking through the features, things like their own VPN.