I'll drastically cut down the NAS autism that was going to be in this post, but I do think it's a growing area of interest across all segments of age and tech literacy.
People have a shocking amount of digital media that they want to store, and formerly free/cheap cloud storage options are going away. Backup software for all platforms universally sucks. The ability to sync media between devices, speedily access/edit/modify, tag and index metadata, and any other modern QoL features are the basic needs people want from their storage.
The (significantly smaller) next layer of interest comes from people who want to casually run interesting local server applications for their home.
The layer after that are all of us autists.
There are 2-3 notable open source projects on GitHub that I expected Linus' HexOS to somewhat resemble
CasaOS and
UmbrelOS (and to a less extent
ArozOS)
I was never expecting them to roll out psuedo-enterprise-grade NAS software like FreeNAS/TrueNAS, or even something simpler like OpenMediaVault or Unraid.
I was hoping for a neat project that was marketable and easy to recommend to people who are interested in a place to start, something that I was confident would stick around for a few years and have interesting features developed for it over time.
That's Linus' value being attached to anything, he will direct his retard army to engage with the software and be an initial install base that makes it worth continuing development and releasing/integrating apps natively.
Backing a skin for TrueNAS does not rectify any of the major usability problems that the OS has always struggled with, all the way back to FreeNAS Corral.
And TrueNAS at a corporate level doesn't even want to be a NAS at this point (hence why they're ditching FreeBSD in favor of Debian), they want to compete with enterprise hypervisors like ESXI, KVM, Hyper-V, Proxmox, XCP-ng, and Xen (fuck Xen). They've continually 180'd on their direction to seek those ends, including that ~3 weeks ago they completely removed Kubernetes integration out of nowhere, giving zero notice to people working with them to develop upon this feature. They have no roadmap for TrueNAS Core at this point (EoL in 2026), and Scale has received no meaningful adoption beyond integrator deployments.
Linus correctly identified a deficiency in the market, but did not meaningfully try to address it and brags about blowing off providing input and expertise to the team developing it. And being completely honest, I feel that a big reason is that it is impossible to (meaningfully) monetize an OS at this point, I think Linus knows this is a fruitless endeavor and provided seed money just to to make the appearance of doing something for the tech community, earn some kudos and get in a few headlines.
