Hello,
I installed Casaos with no real knowledge of homelabs, docker and self hosting about a month ago, and i had a ton of problems since then, and started wondering why even use casaos in the first place.
As I see it, it’s just a good looking dashboard with an app store that doesn’t really help, with a docker app system that lacks important features like custom networking, and a good looking file explorer that is not useful, and for the past month I asked myself a tons of times what is the actual benefit of using casaos. It’s custom docker management made me wonder if you should stay on it or use portainer, which actually seems better, but i don’t want to install a docker management app on a system that already has one, it seems odd to me, and the custom /DATA folder made me make so many errors when setting up arr* that i wonder why it’s even there. My point is, even if it feels easy at start, it will just make you not learn the right way because most users will need features that aren’t there, and learn all over again. The only thing that seems really good and that i didn’t find on other dashboards is a ssh terminal that is really useful, but as i see it, Casaos is really close to be a really good dashboard for beginners and a little more advanced users, and it’s so close that it makes it hard to decide wether sticking to it is a good idea or not. For example with a nextcloud install, you then need to setup a MariaDB install if you want to have a good setup, and things immediately get a lot more complicated than when you just clicked on a button to install nextcloud. Maybe casaos needs apps “stacks” where everything is already configured. So, maybe casaos can and will become better, but at this moment i really don’t know what to do, i still have errors not finished, and maybe a clean install into something like homarr would be better.
And, can someone for once explain what is this custom /DATA folder for ? it caused me so much trouble, i don’t want anyone to experience it. I mean, why not use basic linux folders ? And for example, am i then supposed to setup my *arr apps for hardlinks on the downloads folder and the medias folder or elsewhere ? cause elsewhere is so counter intuitive, and the medias and downloads folders had been a mess for me.
And can this be finally answered, i found nothing : Should you, for the moment as casaos lacks a lot of features, Install and use Portainer instead of the Casaos sytem, or just leave Casaos when you encounter such dilemna ?
Anyway, I just wanted to share my Casaos experience as a real self hosting newbie, because the learning with casaos has not been easy for me.
Have a good day !
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I was thinking about giving CasaOS a try but i think i might just stick with bare metal Ubuntu server with Docker/Docker Compose after reading your complaint. Hell even Portainer bugs me so i guess i cant imagine CasaOS now.
My point of vue is CasaOS / Unraid / Umbrel / … serve a good “first base” with selfhosting. Kind of like a gateway drug: gives you the candy to see how nice it could be but really under the hood, they are lacking a lot of substance.
I would never advise someone to limit their experience to those tools thought, as they lack so many things that are required for a proper long term selfhosting setup (monitoring, backups, encryptions, reverse-proxy, etc…). It’s a decent start thought.
Finally one criticism I could make is, unlike what you often read, I think it’s ok to abstract things. But the issue is, if you’re going to abstract away Docker completely you better make sure to offer everything the user needs to deal with their apps, and as far as I can tell, not only it’s not the case, but also those tools kind of tend to be opiniated in questionable ways. I have never used CasaOS thought, so it’s only 3rd party observation
I’ve looked at a couple of these type things (including Portainer and CosmosOS) and they just add another level of complexity. https://github.com/louislam/dockge looks to be a lot simpler and allows you to use commands that everyone is familiar with.
I installed it because I was curious, and still learning some things about Docker.
I pretty quickly used it to install portrainer, and I’ve since managed everything from there.
The file manager is moderately handy, but nothing I couldn’t do either with the command line or another filemanager tool I’d install through Docker itself.
I still have it set up because I have no need to change it, but I wouldn’t use it if I were doing my setup from scratch.
I’m kind of curious about Cosmos as what seems like a more comprehensive alternative, but I’m pretty happy with how I have some of its other functions (like reverse proxy) set up now, so if I try it, it’ll probably just be to tinker.
I’ve been using casaos for a few months now, but there are zero problems. I just package apps I need in a custom repo, mostly use it for the nice ui