Offer a Debian/Ubuntu Unraid OS Flavor

[KhayrDev]

**Rationale:** Debian and Ubuntu are two of the most widely used Linux distributions with extensive user bases and active contributor communities. Unraid OS currently relies on Slackware, which, to my knowledge, remains a one-maintainer project. This raises concerns about its long-term sustainability, especially since that maintainer will eventually retire. Additionally, Slackware lags behind Debian and Ubuntu in terms of package updates and kernel advancements.

Switching to Debian or Ubuntu would bring several benefits to the Unraid community:
- Faster updates and broader hardware support
- Enhanced security
- Potential for significant growth in Unraid OS adoption

[sephallen]

Debian could be pretty nice due to its stability and LTS policy. Rocky Linux could also be a good alternative.

 

However, due to the somewhat immutable, light-weight unRAID OS which is designed to be booted from a USB flash drive, perhaps something like Alpine would be better suited.

[KhayrDev]

2 minutes ago, sephallen said:

Debian could be pretty nice due to its stability and LTS policy. Rocky Linux could also be a good alternative.

 

However, due to the somewhat immutable, light-weight unRAID OS which is designed to be booted from a USB flash drive, perhaps something like Alpine would be better suited.

To be honest, I’m not sure that Unraid OS is lighter than Ubuntu Server. For example, Unraid OS has a GUI process running out of the box, while Ubuntu Server does not. There are many benefits to moving away from Slackware, whether it's to a Debian-based distro or one of the others you mentioned. Security is a significant factor, but there are also advantages like expanded hardware support and features like apport at the OS level. 

Another great advantage with Ubuntu is that Canonical, which employs hundreds of developers to work on it, also directly collaborates with upstream projects like Docker and ZFS. Slackware simply doesn't have those relationships with upstream projects. At the very least, if Lime won’t consider switching to another distribution, they could make Unraid an application stack that runs on top of any major Linux distro, much like cPanel and many other web apps. This might even be a better idea as it would give users more choice regarding the Linux distro Unraid operates on.

As far as I know, there isn’t any product with a community the size of Unraid that uses Slackware. In fact, I'd generally say that Slackware is more of a personal desktop Linux distro and isn't particularly popular for the kind of tasks Unraid performs. 

[sephallen]

I would say unRAID OS is almost certainly lighter than Ubuntu server - it only ships with what it needs to perform as a NAS. Though I am not saying Ubuntu could not be stripped back to the bare bones too, however I can imagine it would be a lot of work to create and maintain.

 

unRAID is not designed to be a full featured server or to be exposed to the internet. I can't imagine this ethos changing anytime soon.

 

As for unRAID becoming an application, this does sound cool but I believe unRAID ships with a custom build of the Linux kernel. One of the reasons why unRAID is so stable as is able to do what it does is because of the level of access it has to the entire system.

 

I think what you are describing / wanting might already be possible with ZFS or software RAID solutions installed on something like Ubuntu.

[KhayrDev]

53 minutes ago, sephallen said:

I would say unRAID OS is almost certainly lighter than Ubuntu server - it only ships with what it needs to perform as a NAS. Though I am not saying Ubuntu could not be stripped back to the bare bones too, however I can imagine it would be a lot of work to create and maintain.

 

unRAID is not designed to be a full featured server or to be exposed to the internet. I can't imagine this ethos changing anytime soon.

 

As for unRAID becoming an application, this does sound cool but I believe unRAID ships with a custom build of the Linux kernel. One of the reasons why unRAID is so stable as is able to do what it does is because of the level of access it has to the entire system.

 

I think what you are describing / wanting might already be possible with ZFS or software RAID solutions installed on something like Ubuntu.

Unraid OS does not come with just the essentials for a NAS; it also includes GUI packages. Most consumer and commercial NAS systems use a barebone Linux setup without a GUI. As a result, Unraid OS runs heavier processes out of the box than a typical NAS OS or even Ubuntu Server. Any OS with both a GUI and a web interface by default is more resource-intensive than Ubuntu Server. Even if this claim were accurate, optimizing Ubuntu Server in a similar manner would significantly enhance both performance and security. Slackware is developed by one part-time developer, whereas Ubuntu benefits from hundreds of full-time paid developers and thousands of unpaid volunteer contributors. Consequently, Slackware cannot compete with major distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Alpine, which have extensive developer teams and expertise. These mainstream Linux distributions are designed for the cloud and for running applications that Unraid OS runs, while Slackware lacks the same level of support and must wait for upstream patches to be integrated.

 

Disclaimer: As a former Ubuntu/Debian developer, I have no vested interest other than seeing the benefits Unraid OS could achieve by using a distribution designed for running containers and VMs, with a focus on performance and security. If Unraid OS is going to stick with Slackware it should hire a full time Linux developer with experience working on server focused distros to come in and tune Slackware.

[Rysz]

I, for one, think it's great that Unraid uses Slackware and hope it continues to do so in the future.

It's as close to Unix as can be without much of the distribution-specific bloat we see with more popular distributions.

It's extremely stable and achieves that well without "hundreds of full-time paid developers and thousands of unpaid volunteer contributors".

It's simple too, making sane packaging choices that time well with the general pace of Unraid's updates and putting stability over racing updates.

 

Besides, Unraid performs really well on older machines and it's just not made for the end-user to tinker with the underlying OS...

Running off of a more popular platform would increase support tenfold with users thinking "Hey, it's just Ubuntu, let me run that command".

The platform that Unraid ships with is tailored to its very specific needs, not much more and certainly not less - I'd prefer to keep it that way. 🙂 

 

Edited July 19 by Rysz

[KhayrDev]

18 minutes ago, Rysz said:

I, for one, think it's great that Unraid uses Slackware and hope it continues to do so in the future.

It's as close to Unix as can be without much of the distribution-specific bloat we see with more popular distributions.

It's extremely stable and achieves that well without "hundreds of full-time paid developers and thousands of unpaid volunteer contributors".

It's simple too, making sane packaging choices that time well with the general pace of Unraid's updates and putting stability over racing updates.

 

Besides, Unraid performs really well on older machines and it's just not made for the end-user to tinker with the underlying OS...

Running off of a more popular platform would increase support tenfold with users thinking "Hey, it's just Ubuntu, let me run that command".

The platform that Unraid ships with is tailored to its very specific needs, not much more and certainly not less - I'd prefer to keep it that way. 🙂 

 

Fwiw Slackware is not better in performance than Ubuntu or Fedora and absolutely doesn’t have as wide of hardware support. 

[Rysz]

Just now, KhayrDev said:

Fwiw Slackware is not better in performance than Ubuntu or Fedora and absolutely doesn’t have as wide of hardware support. 

 

I never claimed it's more performant than either, the point was that performance is not everything there is to the equation.

[ich777]

On 7/17/2024 at 7:10 AM, KhayrDev said:

Faster updates and broader hardware support

I don’t understand the Kernel is responsible for hardware support not the Distribution.

 

On 7/17/2024 at 7:10 AM, KhayrDev said:

Enhanced security

Why should Spackware be more insecure than Debian.

What we are currently seeing is that Slackware almost switched to a rolling release cycle which is certainly faster what Debian does (an no, I don‘t have anything against Debian because I personally use it on a daily basis and my Computers all run Debian at home).

 

On 7/17/2024 at 7:10 AM, KhayrDev said:

Potential for significant growth in Unraid OS adoption

Because it‘s Debian based afterwards?

I don‘t think that this will be the case.

 

On 7/17/2024 at 7:10 AM, KhayrDev said:

This raises concerns about its long-term sustainability, especially since that maintainer will eventually retire. Additionally, Slackware lags behind Debian and Ubuntu in terms of package updates and kernel advancements.

Slackware has a big Community (around the world) and does not rely on one single maintainer, where do you have that information from?

Slackware isn‘t going to get deprecated anywhere soon from my perspective.
 

Unraid has it‘s own release cycle and uses a completely different Kernel version and of course packages than base Slackware 15.0 or current.

Security updates on Unraid are pushed also relatively quickle (as seen with 6.12.11).

 

Even if Unraid goes with for example Debian you would still have to re install updates from packages every time you boot since Unraid is ran from RAM which in my opinion is a really good thing.

 

However tanking again about the Kernel (since this is the thing where most performance improvements are made), Unraid is now tied to ZFS and they would be already be on the latest Kernel version (6.10.0) if ZFS would be compatible with it but sadly enough it‘s not and Unraid has to still use Kernel version 6.8.12

[ich777]

On 7/17/2024 at 11:09 AM, sephallen said:

Alpine

Alpine is a bad choice since it‘s using musl and has very bad compatibilty since it‘s entirely missing i386

[Querzion]

On 7/17/2024 at 11:24 AM, KhayrDev said:

At the very least, if Lime won’t consider switching to another distribution, they could make Unraid an application stack that runs on top of any major Linux distro, much like cPanel and many other web apps. This might even be a better idea as it would give users more choice regarding the Linux distro Unraid operates on.

I can't state that this would actually be a good thing though. Since if it becomes broader it's going to be more difficult to maintain. If it's one specific distro, then it's a greater chance for fewer problems and having it on a debian/ubuntu base would really advance unRAID as a whole. If there are problems, then there's not only unRAID support to lean on, but also an extensive forum with active users to help if a problem occur such as it is with ubuntu. I would prefer cannonical as a base, if not, they could always make a nixos or arch based version. haha All them crashes belong to us. ;P 

[sephallen]

23 hours ago, ich777 said:

Alpine is a bad choice since it‘s using musl and has very bad compatibilty since it‘s entirely missing i386

 

This is not something I had considered, though I am sure Alpine does have some i386 compatibility but I cannot vouch for it.

 

I would not like to go back to the days where unRAID went from 32-bit to 64-bit and we had essentially zero 32-bit support for some time 😬

Edited July 20 by sephallen
forgot to reference the quote!

[denishay]

On 7/17/2024 at 9:32 PM, sephallen said:

unRAID is not designed to be a full featured server or to be exposed to the internet. I can't imagine this ethos changing anytime soon.

Amen! I'm happy as it stands. I don't want to have a code based on one of those constantly updating distros! I like my peace of mind as it is. Nothing stops anyone from downloading one of those distros and customize it if they want. I'm happy with Unraid as it stands