I’ve been looking at replacements/upgrades for my ds1019+ for a bit now (year or so out, just researching) but it looks like synology has it pretty locked-in for user-friendliness. TrueNAS doesn’t seem to have the UI/multitasking (for example, trying to setup a container and also need to edit firewall rules, and want to see them both on screen to verify that you aren’t about to dive into an hour-long frustration session), official tools (especially their mobile counterparts) look ancient but they work well enough, and while it doesn’t do everything I want from the gui it does everything important and feels like it isn’t exposing me to gotchas or issues that I might get myself into. A lot of times when people start an forum answer with “just ssh into the box” I’m like “nah I don’t need animated cat gifs as my desktop that bad”.

But I do wish it was foss. I feel the positive points I just listed wouldn’t exist, though, so… I guess I’m happy it’s not? Foss projects having programmers do UI is such a downfall for many projects, but I imagine it’s hard to get a UI designer on board with the promise of “exposure” instead of “actual money that will keep you from being evicted”. And most systems tools that are open-source are like “here is the garage, there are the tools, bye” and you’ve never seen a ‘hammer’ or ‘screwdriver’ in your life. I don’t want to get a masters degree to run a home server, ya know?

I don’t mind a bit of proprietary-ness, what I’m after is controlling how and with whom I can share my data.

Essentially the goal is to have a family’s worth of accounts with Calendars, To-Dos/Reminders, and Notes that I can back up myself but still allows syncing to phones/PCs, etc. and basically a central calendar for ‘global’ (ie. Whole family) events.