In the middle of building a self-hosting setup at home so I went ahead and installed this to give it a trial run. I generally like the interface and think it is a nice take on making self-hosting easier, but I have some pure stream of conscious criticism:
1. There sure are a lot of crypto apps. I'm not vehemently anti-crypto, but it is missing some "obvious" applications and full of those, so I'm curious what the play was there. They're all spread all over the place isntead of in a single category too. There are non-crypto finance apps that are self-hosted (Actual, BudgE, etc.), please don't mix them.
2. Plex and/or jellyfin stand out as huge misses right out of the gate.
3. I am surprised that it doesn't use nginx proxy manager with preset configs to make this all available from a single domain. Needs letsencrypt + a DDNS provider too while you're at it.
4. Why no blog/cms?
5. Can I give it the docker-compose config for an application not on the app store somewhere in GUI?
6. Wait, why is this accessible from Tor? And I can't turn it off? Nope nope nope.
Thanks for the taking the time to try Umbrel out, great observations!
1. Re crypto apps, I figured some additional context may help. Before our today's release, Umbrel was a self-hosting OS primarily geared towards Bitcoin node users. Today, we migrated the Bitcoin node to the Umbrel App Store and took the last step in our transition to becoming an app-agnostic general purpose OS. So expect to see a lot more non-Bitcoin apps hereon!
2. Yes, agree. We'll have Plex and Jellyfin live in the app store soon.
3. The main issue we found with using a single domain on the local network is that many Android phones and PCS have flaky mDNS support, in which case name resolution for "*.local" would simply fail. This is why we decided to use ports. Perhaps we can look into using ports on the local network and domain on a VPS.
4. Good suggestion! Feel free to share your recommendations.
6. Until now, a common use case of our users has been remote connection between Umbrel and their Bitcoin wallets over Tor. This is why remote access was baked directly into Umbrel and turned-on by default.
However, as we've now evolved from the Bitcoin space, we'll prioritize offering the ability to disable remote Tor access functionality in the next update, and make it opt-in instead of opt-out.
Caddy has state-of-the-art certificate automation and TLS support, and with that module, it automatically updates DNS records if users have non-static IPs. It'll also serve certs for localhost domains (use *.localhost IMO).
Re 3, that's why you need to run a DNS server in your LAN, like pihole or adguard or coredns. And don't use .local, use .home.arpa instead, or use a DDNS domain like DuckDNS and make it resolve to your LAN IP with your DNS server. And use Caddy (shameless plug)
1. Makes sense, looking forward to progress there.
2. Excellent. I’d consider one of the Wireguard VPN servers be prioritized as well.
3. I wouldn’t use mDNS for it, I would either require and integrate the PiHole configuration or come with a DNS server as well (leaning towards PiHole here). I’d suggest long-term planning on integrating DNS/DDNS and LetsEncrypt. I use a combo of a DDNS container for CloudFlare and a wildcard DNS generated by nginx proxy manager.
4. I’d go for one “simple” CMS, like Ghost, and one fully featured, like WordPress.
5. Will check it out.
6. Appreciate it being an option, I’ve signed up for the mailing list to get a notification when it is available so I can make another run at it.
I’m pleased to see the support for deploying directly to your own Umbrel without going through the App Store / pull request process. This is one of my biggest frustrations with Unraid.
It would be nice to have first class support for deploying stuff this way - not just for testing. I would like to deploy custom containers / compositions on my Umbrel and see them alongside stuff installed from the official repository. Ok to require an external guy repo as upstream for this, but better to work entirely local.
> Today, we migrated the Bitcoin node to the Umbrel App Store and took the last step in our transition to becoming an app-agnostic general purpose OS
Hello, do you have plans to interop with an established selfhosting distro and package scheme? Yunohost, Freedombox and Libreserver come to mind. If you'd rather go the containerized/virtualized way, there's a dozen or so distros based on Docker/LXC/K8S to make selfhosting easier.
I'm always happy that people are building stuff for selfhosting (though like others i'm skeptical of anything cryptocurrency-related), so please don't take it as a dismissal of your work, but i don't understand the appeal of building yet another solution and package format that's not interoperable with the others who have been out there for 5/10 years and provide good services to plenty of users already.
To be fair, apart from Dockerfiles there's not exactly any decent specification for declarative sysadmin (network ports, filesystem access..). The selfhosting field could certainly use a specification for selfhosted packages across distros, because the current situation places a strong burden on volunteer maintainers to keep up with updates.
> Which ones do you have in mind? Would you count ChromeOS as one of those, too?
A few i had in mind (from my bookmarks): Cloudron, Sandstorm, HomelabOS, libre.sh, UBOS, Unraid, Helm, CasaOS, servers.coop's Capsul. In my opinion, in those virtualized solutions Sandstorm is the only one that's not a simple GUI for docker/LXC and had some actually interesting research going on (especially in terms of security). That's for generic selfhosting solutions, and i personally have no strong opinion about these as i'm more interested about bare-metal solutions that work on low-end hardware (Freedombox/Yunohost/LibreServer).
To this list you can add the free ansible/docker recipes used by friendly hosting coops such as webarch.coop or disroot.org. I'm guessing many other CHATONS.org/Libreho.st federation members also publish their recipes, but i wouldn't know for sure.
I don't count ChromeOS as anything as my understanding is it's just a web browser with a custom kernel? I may be missing something as i've never used it, and if i don't have the source code and/or have to pay Google a single cent to use it i most probably will never try it out.
Thanks for the information! To be honest, i'm still not interesting to fall into anything maintained by Google, but i see the value you're proposing.
Personally, when it comes to desktop virtualization, i'm very happy with QubesOS. It's not designed for graphics performance, but it's to my knowledge the only distro providing decent security for multi-VM graphical workloads, and their research keeps going!
#5 is very interesting to me. I use (and paid for!) Unraid. It’s generally quite good. Their Community Apps plug-in scratches the same itch as the Umbrel App Store. I run several community-maintained of services with it, but it is… unclear… how to spin up your own image.
From what I can tell (and I might be dumb) you can’t really run a Docker image on Unraid unless you:
1) write an XML file using an undocumented schema
2) build and upload your image to Docker hub
3) get your container listed in community apps
Now I’m SURE it’s not actually that dumb. But I couldn’t figure it out before I got distracted, and thus I haven’t done it. All the “documentation” is exclusively forum threads. What little formal documentation exists is obsolete. It really feels like it’s set up for a core community of developers rather than the users.
Coming from that experience, I was impressed with a couple things about Umbrel as I read through OP:
(1) they have clear documentation on how to publish something to their App Store
(2) they have a documented YAML that handles most of the configuration
(3) they take an active role in curating the App Store. They claim to help you put together a nice listing.
(4) they have some actual tools to test your package
(5) the App Store has a concept of cross-app dependencies. They give the example of a blockchain explorer that needs a bitcoin node running. Very cool! I want to use this functionality to have one RDBMS, one git host, one logging service, etc all shared by the various apps I deploy.
Yeah, that's my biggest gripe with Unraid. Give me a way to write my own Dockerfile without having to SSH into the server! As an OSS maintainer of a project that supports custom builds with plugins, this is basically necessary for some users to use our project.
Umbrel started as a way to easily host a Bitcoin node, so naturally there is plenty of Bitcoin related stuff. I think they only have one crypto (ie non-Bitcoin) app though.
I am amazed to see people are interested in running Bitcoin nodes. As far as I know, none of the people I have talked to about Bitcoin or shit coins have any interest in running a full node. This is the thing that convinced me that cryptocurrency is a fad or worse a place people see to make a quick buck.
When I looked into it, a Bitcoin node took over 300GB of space on your computer. I'd imagine that is over 600 GB now. Is anyone running full nodes on a raspberry pi?
I run one, it's quite easy and reasonably cheap. I admit the main value prop is feeling smug about your opsec, but the self-sovereignty thesis and culture of bitcoin are genuinely important. A small minority of people (nerds) running their own nodes is a way to keep the wider network more honest and help regular people benefit from using it.
I'm glad to see that there are sixteen thousand full nodes because the last I heard there were fewer than ten thousand.
I have never spent actual currency to get Bitcoin but I cannot imagine being serious enough about Bitcoin to put tens of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin but then putting that money in Coinbase or something like that. (sorry YC, I know I was wrong about Dropbox and but I think I am still correct about Coinbase).
Many people do. A large part of Umbrels initial user base falls in that category. A reliable enough 1TB SSD costs <$100. A full bitcoin node takes ~500GB today.
Would it be possible to run Mastodon on this? With it being behind a domestic firewall, would that make it harder to other Mastodon instances to talk to it? Ditto for other ActivityPub software.
I'd like to see a world where anyone can easily set up and run their own social media from a Pi running on their home network.
This is a service I'm interested in, but by fuck is their website annoying. Instead of having stupid moving rectangles of services you can run on Umbrel, why not just display each service as a paragraph of text, with an icon next to it? No animations, and no rectangles moving across the screen.
These people have put a good deal of effort into their landing screen, unfortunately this effort has made it worse than it would have been if it was simple text descriptions. Please improve this.
I agree, that's my least favorite part of the site as well. We'll update it with a browsable directory of all the available apps in our app store soon.
And data recovery services would have a field day :)
Self hosting in 2022 is not exactly a walk in the park. Besides the obvious security risks of data loss/theft through exploits, you also have a challenge making anything as redundant as a cloud service.
Most major cloud services offer multi geographical redundancy, meaning if one data center completely vanishes (like the OVH fire), your data is safe in another data center, and hastily restoring redundancy to yet another data center.
You get versioning as well, i.e. OneDrive offers unlimited versions for 30 days, allowing you to roll back your entire account to a date 30 days in the past in case of malware attacks.
Add to that redundant hardware, power, internet, spare parts, physical access control, fire prevention and more.
On the other side of the fence, we have that old gaming PC that has been repurposed as a "home server", running Unraid, or slightly better TrueNAS in Raid-Z1, and not a backup in sight because "raid". Furthermore it probably hasn't been patched in months unless it defaults to auto updating.
I'm well aware that there are people that are serious about self hosting (i used to be one), but the above repurposed gaming PC is what you'll get in A LOT of the cases.
And to top it all off, with electricity prices in Europe as they are right now, the cloud is cheaper than running your own hardware, except of course for multi TB storage. A 4 bay Synology consuming 45W costs about €18/month in electricity alone, and a 60W server costs €23.5/month.
I think just renting a machine and installing your own software/OS is also beneficial to using cloud services from a privacy perspective, e.g. running your own NextCloud on Hetzner or the likes.
I didn't say cheap, though that would help of course. But people aren't opposed to buying hardware if the UX is worth it (see: Apple). And I do think it could be worth it if installing services was as easy as installing apps on your phone. No signup process, and data can be shared between services.
I'm imagining something like Synology NAS with it's apps [1], but with more user submitted services, and better connectivity between them. If Umbrel/Yunohost/Sandstorm/Cloudron released a pre-configured raspberry pi with some sane defaults, that could be a step in the right direction.
HP (?) tried pushing the home server pretty hard several years ago, but I don’t think it ever took off, as I haven’t heard about it in any mainstream sense in years. But to your point, it was just running Windows Server, which isn’t exactly consumer friendly.
For something like a home server to take off it really needs to have that killer app. For most that would probably be something like Plex/Jellyfin, but your average user is just going to sign up for streaming services instead. And if a media server is all you want, Synology can take care of that pretty well. I recently moved my Plex server from a Mac mini (which I used in some form since Plex was first launched) over to a Synology NAS using Docker. Of course that’s not very user friendly, but assuming the native Plex app is better for the average Joe.
With so many cloud providers that make it easy to get to your data anywhere in the world via your laptop or phone, it’s hard to argue in favor of moving to home servers for much of anything. Sure, you can access it remotely if you set it up, but it’s going to be more hit and miss, and when things don’t work you’re just stuck hoping you can fix it.
That’s a fair point, but there are lots of people who want one less thing to manage - the underlying infrastructure is a large piece to offload from the mental load of self hosting.
exactly, the stuff I self host is based on debian-stable or debian-testing amd64 starting from a very normal barebones debian CLI-only configuration (about 1GB of disk space occupied), and adding stuff from there.
If some one is going through the trouble of self hosting, why would they want to use a closed source proprietary OS to do it? Most of the apps available for this are open source, so why not host them on an open source system and not have any vendor lock-in?
> Selling Umbrel, including selling cloud-hosted instances with Umbrel or its derivates, home server hardware with Umbrel or its derivates, support services for Umbrel or its derivates, etc is not permitted under our license.
There are plenty of Open Source solutions that fit that description. Of course what one person thinks of as 'good' another may think is 'bad' and there may be enough folks who think the same way as the Umbrel folks to make it work. I certainly wish them well in their endeavors.
self hosting doesn't always mean opensource. could be people wanting to have control of their data. there are many closed source self hosting apps - emby, plex, confluence/jira, teamspeak, filerun to name a few.
While the product itself also looks interesting, I'd mainly want to congragulate the developers on their choice of licensing. While it might not be for everyone, there really needs to be a larger movement of exploring and upgrading OSS licensing models to better fit today's digital economy.
Looks great on first look, but on closer inspection saw that it's written in pure JavaScript (0% TypeScript) + Bash. Honestly makes me a bit worried about security. Now, I'm not so thrilled about it anymore...
Judging the security of an application based on its use of typescript is like when people judge the intelligence of a person depending on if they have an English or an American accent.
While we're doing analogies: I don't think it's like judging someone's intelligence from their accent. It's more like betting (or not) on the Jamaican bobsleigh team for an olympic medal. -- Certain programming languages invite buggy code more than others. Certain countries are a better environment than others for winter sports.
Are security updates and DevOps automatic? How fine grained are the security updates i.e. Kernel level or app level? How long does it take end-to-end from CVE patch release to end user applying the update?
Yunohost.org is completely FOSS and a Debian based distro. It has no crypto apps. It is quite polished over many years including backup, lets encrypt, DNS, NGINX, fail2ban, diagnosis, and a nice web UI.
Licensing is a nuanced subject so we've written a detailed post on it. But in short, our license grants you the same rights that come with an open source license, except the right to sell or commercialize Umbrel.
No, it's not Open Source. It's a perfectly justifiable decision, but it's not Open Source, nor is it equivalent.
Yes, your license means that individual users can make little patches to customize the product to their needs, and even share these customizations with other users. That's great!
But the license effectively prohibits borrowing code from your codebase for use in other projects, meaning your code does not become part of the aether of Open Source code that anyone can build upon. That's a very important part of what it means to be "Open Source".
It also effectively prevents any large-scale modification or forking effort, since maintaining patches as the underlying codebase evolves is a hard job, and the license prohibits people from funding such effort. If users want timely security updates, they will need to stick close to your version of the codebase. So the lock-in is there.
Again, this is all a perfectly justified direction for you to take. I don't blame you at all, and I definitely understand that it's Amazon's fault that we cannot have nice things. But it's not Open Source.
On a tangentially-related note, a little tip: You have defined all noncommercial organizations -- including education, public research, and government -- as being permitted users. That may be dangerous. I was the founder of Sandstorm, and these organizations were exactly the ones most interested in paying for our product -- literally the only big sales we ever made were a couple universities, a big research org, and a government. Despite being non-profit, these orgs have lots of money and a need for self-hosting.
Thanks for the insightful reply. Everything you said makes total sense.
Re noncommercial organizations being permitted users, this was a conscious decision on our part. We're purposefully building Umbrel purely for consumers, and don't plan to serve any commercial or noncommercial organizations. We want to align our incentives directly with consumers instead of enterprises, and this is purely to help us focus on building for the user-base that excites us the most.
I'm a big fan of Sandstorm btw. It was way ahead of its time.
I see. Well, I hope you are able to succeed at that. For what it's worth, we initially focused on consumer use but weren't able to find a path to revenue there.
Despite a lot of noise on HN, we had only a few hundred signups for our paid hosting service. We built super-scalable hosting tech but it turned out we could have hosted them on a single big VM all along... oops.
I think the problem is that the apps, while functional, weren't competitive with their SaaS competitors, and so the only reason to use the hosting service was if you really cared about the Open Source aspect. Maybe if we had a killer app that was actually better than any SaaS alternative, we could have gotten somewhere? But we never found that.
Meanwhile, we got a lot of feedback from people working at big orgs that were forced to self-host for regulatory reasons. Such orgs are terribly served by the current software market, since they can essentially only buy software from companies that specialize in building regulated software, and those companies generally build software that is expensive and terrible.
Real-time collaboration essentially didn't exist in this market, making our apps actually better than what these organizations had! But we had absolutely no expertise in selling to orgs like this, and we never really figured it out. We should have hired for it much earlier, or maybe even brought on another co-founder with enterprise sales experience.
So, we were unable to get anywhere before investors pulled the plug.
With that said, I always say you should not trust anyone's advice. Your story is different and you need to do what makes intuitive sense to you. If your intuition is right, you succeed. But you certainly can't succeed by going against your own intuition, so if someone says something that doesn't make intuitive sense to you, ignore it.
Thank you for your work on Sandstorm! I live in the highly-regulated, not-for-profit world. Sandstorm's architecture was very compelling for us. Self-hosting was a good place to start and the Capability-based Security solved a lot of problems.
I agree that the overall functionality for the apps wasn't quite up to snuff. The problem is, self-hosted apps are structurally under-resourced relative to their hosted peers. This is because SaaS providers can amortize development costs over a much bigger user base while simultaneously capturing operations efficiencies.
In my world, we want all the latest stuff, but refuse to let anyone host our data. We wind up with a small vendor pool that specializes in meeting regulatory requirements instead of making good software. I am very interested in finding technical solutions to this problem. Or at least, technical solutions that create new options to solve the operational and cultural problems!
To be fair, I think Umbrel has a very different consumer story: Since it has a much stronger crypto focus, it is targeting consumers much more likely to spend (crypto)money, I think, than the average consumer.
And a key difference is that Cloudron and Umbrel may monetize selfhosters, which I believe Sandstorm did not endeavor to do at all.
Yeah that doesn't surprise me, you pretty much have to pay them regularly if using Cloudron, even as an individual, whereas nobody hosting their own Sandstorm server ever had to pay anything. Even when Cloudron was open source, updates weren't automatic unless you subscribed.
I think personal servers is pretty key, so I'm glad there are a few endeavors working on it.
Especially when one of the VC firms that funds your project is also the one behind formulation of the PolyForm set of licenses, I'd imagine. At least, PolyForm is better, in some sense, than fully closed source projects built atop other MIT/BSD/Apache licensed projects (say, the V8 JavaScript engine ;), and never shared.
The only reason I dislike non-OSI approved licenses are, the "users" of such licenses want to have their cake and eat it too: As in, they want to project open source ethos while also denying the advantages/rights otherwise afforded by Open Source, as defined by the OSI.
Imo, source-available licenses are justified only when companies using it are honest about their intentions and forthcoming about the license's limitations. Nothing specific on Umbrel, but generally, misdirection by firms insistent on source-available licenses as being some convenient 'middle-ground' is off-putting, to say the least!
I've followed Umbrel since I first stumbled upon it in August 2020, and of course, I'd have liked them to be open-source (since I don't believe software is their core advantage, rather their brand is; but then again, what do I know): https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel/issues/291#issuecomment-...
That said, Umbrel already brings a lot to the table... its licensing is a predictable HN distraction from discussion on its true potential.
Except it denies me the right to purchase support services from the vendor of my choosing. It also denies me the ability to hire a contractor of my choosing to create a derivative of the product or even contribute changes to the product. It further denies me the ability to receive sponsorship from another individual to create a derivative work (This falls under commercializing, but the other two would not be me doing the commercializing).
These are all rights I have with Open Source software that is denied by your non-commercial license. Reading your blog post, you seem to not understand Open Source nor do you seem to understand the implications of your own license very well.
What does the backup experience look like? I feel like that is a major difficulty for people looking to self host, at least for me.
I would not want to lose my pictures, contacts or NextCloud files due to some update failure, hardware failure or my own mistake in managing the system.
Love it! Private self hosting but made easy for the people (like me) who don't want to spend hours setting it all up and keeping it up to date! Also the design looks amazing, finally some open source project with an actual designer haha
Btw can't sign up for the newsletter although tried multiple emails and disabled adblocker. Just says "Oops! Something went wrong. Can you please try again?"...
There is an OS in there, at least one, I haven't installed Umbrel but I know this is in it... (I can't believe all these comments and nobody mentioned Urbit yet!)
> Run your own node and achieve unparalleled privacy by connecting your wallet directly to your Bitcoin node. This ensures that your wallet company can’t spy on your transactions
Everybody can "spy" on your transactions by design, isn't it so? Isn't mixing the only way to go if you don't want everybody to see your entire shopping history?
It feels like it has a lot of shared territory with FreeNAS or Synology without the hardware.
What support, if any, is there for reading S.M.A.R.T. Stats, ZFS, and BTRFS? You mention CPU temps, but what about things that actually matter in regular use cases?
I really enjoyed the landing page. I don't usually enjoy eye candy and loud designs, but this one works fine. Lots of visuals and lots of questions answered in direct ways. Great job!
Sorry, but with the focus on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, there's no way I'd ever be able to trust this product. Just going to their website, where that really slow image of a browser windows loading that says "good morning, satoshi" - just no.
I should have specified Sandstorm, there's apparently a reply from one of the leads of Sandstorm here I need to find.I also should have written "and competitors" like Yunohost and Cloudron but someone else also replied with that so hopefully someone gets some more info.
The major problem with Umbrel is that even though they package all in one-solutions. If something goes wrong you rely on umbrel for issues (against decentralization). You will rely on their updates for any problems.
start9 built an linux os group up. all services are individually packaged from source.
umbrel packages all dependencies together (via docker container) which could causes issues for maintenace.
I see it offers home assistant. I wonder if you can also use the addon functionality in that as it's based on docker containers.. I assume umbrel uses docker too so it might conflict?
How does it do in terms of privacy and security? I would prefer to hide my IP address and also doubt I am competent enough to efficiently protect a server from hacker attacks.
*Disclaimer: I'm not trying to be rude with my question, please forgive any perceived negative tone -- I am just curious.
> I recently tried to set up an SSH server on NixOS and gave up after a day. And I love NixOS.
Setting up OpenSSH is one of the more trivial tasks on any Unix-like operating system. So I'm curious as to why you "love" NixOS despite it sounding like you aren't comfortable with (at least what I consider) a very trivial system setting change?
If you add the following to your configuration.nix and rebuild your system this will setup OpenSSH:
```
services.openssh.enable = true;
```
And if you have enabled the firewall you can make sure that port 22 is allowed with this:
Being unable to enable SSH on NixOS sounds more of like a lack of understanding of how to use NixOS. Again, I'm exceedingly curious as to why you love NixOS but are unable to make such a trivial change to your system? Did you actually install NixOS on your system?
I am a huge fan of people at any stage of expertise loving NixOS and playing with it and I apologize if this question sounds like me being a dick or trying to police your experience -- please continue to love NixOS!
This update showed up as soon as my 10 days old install sync with the BTC Blockchain: congrats!
I'm looking forward to some backup service - ideally one I can also self host offsite - but don't mind a sensible paid service. I assume the Blockchain itself doesn't need to be backed up but my apps data, yes.
I'd love to have another umbrel server being used as backup in case the primary one "goes down"
Pretty sure I'm in the minority of HN folks, but I'm a fan of tools/OS'es/whatever that make a concerted effort to follow design trends and present a modern-looking UX.
To “follow design trends and present a modern-looking UX” is far from synonymous with “beautiful”, which in turn is very much in the eye of the beholder. The problem with “beautiful” is that it’s a manipulative fluff word which gives no information whatsoever about the product except that its marketing people seem to want the product to be perceived as beautiful. The other issue is its inflationary use. Every other product thinks it needs to add “beautiful” to its tag line.
To be honest, software nowadays is more lacking in other areas. Putting “beauty” as a foremost concern is more of a sign that they don’t see that lack, and therefore are less likely to address it. “Beauty” doesn’t make software more practical or its use more productive. The tools in my toolbox don’t have to be “beautiful”. They don’t become better tools by being more “beautiful”.
(I’m putting “beautiful” in quotes because it’s largely subjective what that means for UIs and software.)
Fair point. The way I see it - if you think about beauty, you must already have accomplished everything else. Otherwise yes, beauty for the sake of it is useless.
Say I have a knife - of course I want it first and foremost to be a "good" knife (again, "good" between quotes, because that is also subjective). But for a good knife that I'll have around for many years I want it to be also beautiful. I would not want a good knife with an ugly plastic handle. But of course, like you say, I would also not want a beautifully carved knife that is unusable.
This Umbrel thing we are discussing here - I happen to love it, and I've been using it constantly for more than half a year. I looked at the competition as well, and guess what - the alternatives with ugly UIs have a terrible architecture behind the scenes. Take RaspiBlitz for example, the most beloved competitor of Umbrel - I went through the source code trying to understand how it works and I was horrified. All just files full of magic commands placed in magic locations. Good luck trying to deploy an app you create on RaspiBlitz! Sure you can, but it's not "nice". Umbrel on the other hand has a clean architecture and a short tutorial on how to make any app run on it - dockerize it, create a yaml to describe it, BAM!
Never tried the Start9 Embassy, but I think it's at least equally good, and maybe a little bit less beautiful. I'll try it anyway. But I don't see myself trying the outright ugly alternatives.
I guess somebody that tries to make something beautiful also tends to find beautiful solutions to otherwise mundane problems.
Great project, congrats! I have tried some of the homelab solutions. In some aspects the success of these projects depend on whether you keep testing and updating the docker compose files. Meaning: for years! You need a test environment to test the new versions of the apps as they come out. This can be quite a lot of work that many underestimate.
1. There sure are a lot of crypto apps. I'm not vehemently anti-crypto, but it is missing some "obvious" applications and full of those, so I'm curious what the play was there. They're all spread all over the place isntead of in a single category too. There are non-crypto finance apps that are self-hosted (Actual, BudgE, etc.), please don't mix them.
2. Plex and/or jellyfin stand out as huge misses right out of the gate.
3. I am surprised that it doesn't use nginx proxy manager with preset configs to make this all available from a single domain. Needs letsencrypt + a DDNS provider too while you're at it.
4. Why no blog/cms?
5. Can I give it the docker-compose config for an application not on the app store somewhere in GUI?
6. Wait, why is this accessible from Tor? And I can't turn it off? Nope nope nope.