If you are somewhat comfortable with the cli you could install proxmox as zfs then create datasets off the pool to do whatever you want. If you wanted a nicer gui to manage zfs you could also install cockpit on the proxmox hypervisor directly along with the zfs plugin to manage the datasets and share them a bit easier. Obviously you could do all of that from the command line too.

Personally I use proxmox now where before I made use of Debian. The only reason I switched was it made vm/lxc management easy. As for truenas it’s also basically Debian with a different gui. These days I’m more focused on optimization in my home lab journey. I hope you enjoy the experience however you begin and whatever applications you start with.

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I use Portainer and it’s a good UI, but I find the way they market business edition pretty scummy. Like having a banner ad constantly visible on the page, and having half the features visible but disabled with a big bright “upgrade to Business Edition” message next to them, and directly refusing to add any mechanism to opt out. I respect that they need funding for development, but they need to realize that a lot of their users simply don’t need a business license and aren’t going to buy one no matter how much advertisement you throw at them. The fact that they don’t realize that and refuse to budge indicates to me that they’ve stopped caring about the user experience of their product.

Sorry for the rant, I’ve been annoyed by this for a long time. Some day I’ll set up my own gitops pipeline, but that pesky day job keeps getting in the way.

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