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Show HN: Umbrel – A personal server OS for self-hosting
- wngr 4y agoNice to see more competition in that space! I'm a long term happy user of https://unraid.net/ https://unraid.net/, which I can very much recommend.
- melony 4y agoLooks good, I have some questions. 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?
- apitman 4y agoHow does it compare to Sandstorm, yunohost, and Cloudron?
- ensignavenger 4y agoIt defintely needs some documentation! It is closed source proprietary software, so that is one major difference.
- Johnnynator 4y agoIt is Open Source, but under a Non-Free License (PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0).
- ensignavenger 4y agoThe PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 is not an Open Source license.
- Johnnynator 4y agoFair, one can see this as just source available. But still far more permissive than cloudron's license.
- ensignavenger 4y agoOkay, I will admit I am only familiar with Sandstorm from that list :)
- nullcipher 4y agoCloudron is also source available - https://git.cloudron.io https://git.cloudron.io
- mayankchhabra 4y agoLicensing 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. Here's our post that explains our licensing in detail: https://blog.getumbrel.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-umbrels-new-license-f9807203a57e https://blog.getumbrel.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about...
- ensignavenger 4y agoExcept 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kentonv 4y agoNo, 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.
- kornhole 4y agoYunohost.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.
- ensignavenger 4y agoIf 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?
- api 4y agoThey want something with good UI/UX and that is maintained and that they don't have to spend hours a week futzing around with? There is nothing "free as in beer" that even comes close to this in polish. This is gorgeous.
- ensignavenger 4y agoThere 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.
- mayankchhabra 4y agoUmbrel's source code is public and there's no vendor lock-in: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel
- ensignavenger 4y agoThe license forbids me to hire another vendor to service the product. That is the definition of vendor lock-in.
- pengaru 4y ago> The license forbids me to hire another vendor to service the product. That is the definition of vendor lock-in. Where in the license does it forbid such a thing? Commercial use != an individual paying for third party support/service/development.
- candiddevmike 4y agoI think the overlap of folks who want to self host and folks who don't already use a preferred Linux distro or Windows is quite small.
- walrus01 4y agoexactly, 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.
- woojoo666 4y agoIf self hosting were as easy and stable as signing up for a cloud service, I think people would switch
- Hamuko 4y agoHow do you suppose that would happen? You need some kind of hardware to self-host.
- leodriesch 4y agoI 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.
- woojoo666 4y agoI 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. https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/packages https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/packages
- mihaic 4y agoWhile 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.
- layer8 4y agoAt this point, any marketing copy using the word “beautiful” is a major turn-off for me.
- chrisshroba 4y agoPretty 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.
- layer8 4y agoTo “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.
- ibz 4y ago> except that its marketing people seem to want the product to be perceived as beautiful It means they care about beauty in the first place, which is already a huge plus.
- layer8 4y agoTo 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.)
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- bee_rider 4y agoIs this an OS or just a distro? They claim you can convert an Ubuntu install by just curl-ing their script, which makes me lean toward distro.
- yebyen 4y agoThere 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!)
- jiscariot 4y agoShhhh. Let sleeping dogs lie.
- wmf 4y agoIt's not even a distro; it's a control panel running on an existing distro.
- PontifexMinimus 4y agoThis 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.
- mayankchhabra 4y agoI 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.
- PontifexMinimus 4y agoThis would be really useful, as it would allow people to quickly highlight where they would find it useful for them.
- infinityio 4y agoPerhaps as a middle ground - keep the autoscrolling rectangles, but let the user intervene and move them?
- sergiomattei 4y agoAs a counterpoint, I found it clear, neat and visually appealing.
- nathan_phoenix 4y agoLove 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?"...
- GekkePrutser 4y agoI 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?
- agentdrtran 4y agoHow will this be different from previous services that tried this type of product and failed?
- leodriesch 4y agoJust out of interest, could you list some?
- agentdrtran 4y agoI 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.
- nullcipher 4y agoIf you are referring to sandstorm, kentonv (founder of sandstorm) has made some great points, if you scroll up.
- xz18r 4y agoI have a home server with Docker containers running, some of them exposed publicly. Am I the target audience?
- nathan_phoenix 4y agoLooks 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...
- vorpalhex 4y agoI think you are misunderstanding something about security or typescript...
- smcleod 4y agoYeah... JS/node/electron - I could do with far less of these things in my life, not more - especially when it comes to security vulnerabilities.
- wmf 4y agoIt's mostly a Web UI for Docker Compose so I'm not sure what else it would be written in.
- junon 4y agoJudging 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.
- gyulai 4y agoWhile 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.
- junon 4y agoI disagree entirely with this assertion.
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- nfgrep 4y agoAfter wrestling with TrueNAS for months, this looks pretty good. I also really, reaally like the initiative to make self-hosting accessible.
- Jeff_Brown 4y agoWhy is setting up your own server so hard? I recently tried to set up an SSH server on NixOS and gave up after a day. And I love NixOS.
- heywoodlh 4y ago*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: ``` networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 22 ]; ``` And then just rebuild your system. 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!
- evulhotdog 4y agoIt 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?
- leodriesch 4y agoWhat 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.
- eightysixfour 4y agoIn 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.
- forum_ghost 4y ago> missing some "obvious" applications what would that be?
- declon 4y ago> Plex and/or jellyfin stand out as huge misses right out of the gate.
- nullcipher 4y agowhy is there so much crypto stuff? Probably me but by default I don't trust things that are crypto related.
- ibz 4y agoUmbrel 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.
- wmf 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- senectus1 4y agothe cryptocurrency theme makes me want to avoid it as an immediate visceral reaction. and I dabble in cryptocurrency. I would suggest that you will struggle to grow in the mainstream with that theme.
- ibz 4y agoAre you suggesting that cryptocurrencies will fail to go mainstream?
- Xeoncross 4y agoI 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!
- uo21tp5hoyg 4y agoLove that the video under the "De-google yourself" header is on YouTube.
- philistine 4y agoThis thing flagrantly copies macOS' user interface. I'd be wary of getting a letter.
- xnacly 4y agoI'd say its just a gnome theme or something. It's not that deep.
- leodriesch 4y agoIt’s not gnome or any desktop environment for that matter, it’s a custom made web application.
- abartl 4y agoGreat 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.
- john61 4y agoThere is also https://freedombox.org/ https://freedombox.org/ . A pure Debian Blend and also available as appliance. (Olimex A20 SBC)
- nsonha 4y agoa management UI on top of tailscale?
- 627467 4y agoThis 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"
- tallanvor 4y agoSorry, 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.
- qwerty456127 4y agoHow 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.
- qwerty456127 4y ago> 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?
- emurillo510 4y agoIf you are reading this please take a look at start9. https://start9.com/ https://start9.com/ 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. // start9 vs umbrel https://youtu.be/kmfzATMxCj4 https://youtu.be/kmfzATMxCj4 // what is start9 embassy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfMvXJxYamw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfMvXJxYamw
- hammyhavoc 4y agoHad me until they invoked Bitcoin. That's a hard "no".
- floatinglotus 4y agoWith all the associations with crypto and forcing you to run a TOR/lightning node, I’ll stick with Portainer.