Show HN: I've built a nice home server OS

Congrats on launching something (more than most of us will ever manage), but I am struggling to see why I would use this over something with more backing. There are a number of similar projects that have a very similar goal, but have the support of a large community and/or commercial sponsor:

- Flatcar Container Linux: An open-source, immutable OS designed for automatic updates and large-scale container deployments.

- Fedora CoreOS: A, secure, automatically updating operating system designed for running containerized applications, succeeding the original CoreOS.

- Talos Linux: A modern, immutable, security-focused OS dedicated entirely to Kubernetes.

- IncusOS: an immutable OS solely designed around safely and reliably running Incus.

I think you need to more clearly explain how this is different. Again, congrats on the launch though.

As long as there is software, you cannot shortcut the need for maintenance. Nothing is bug free, and telling people they will never need to upgrade/patch/maintain a system is a well-paved path to compromised systems.

Interesting - but how do I patch, upgrade and build my own iso?

The source repository isn't very enlightening?

> The actual repository here hosts the source code for Lightwhale, and is not of any interest for most people.

> https://bitbucket.org/asklandd/lightwhale/src/master/

This is relevant to what I have been learning about recently!

I'm getting ready to launch an online game and I'm dealing with "how do I just run my game server on dozens of boxes without dealing with linux stuff".

I don't really have an answer yet (leaning into "just get one really powerful box" lol), but my investigation into the problem so far has been pretty interesting.

You can conceptualize the "my program + the OS" as a single program. It's not a pretty picture. Lots of global mutable state. (Also it randomly modifies itself??)

The whole point of Docker appears to be "I just want to run my program", in the least painful way possible. Immutable Linux extends the "lean in the direction of sanity" idea. (The programming and OS worlds seem to be learning the same lessons, from different angles.)

And then there's "it turns out the OS solves problems I don't have, while creating many new problems", which leads to Unikernels. Fun stuff ;)

In a perfect world, I wouldn't need the OS at all. Docker gives me two Linuxes to worry about! The number of operating systems I want to worry about is zero!

Which brings us to Unikernels! Just ditch the OS! Technically the right answer, except... now I'm a kernel developer? Maybe that's the least bad option, long term.

I'm a novice in this space I think. I've self-hosted for over a decade and around 2019 I moved over to Unraid, which is generally pretty visual (web portal or configuring and doing maintenance). I find the web portal very easy. How does one interact with your home server OS? I assume it's all via terminal because there are no pictures on the website?

What's the recommended way to regularly backup the data used by containers running on Lightwhale?

This is a Linux distro, not an OS!

I wish there was something like this or talos or coreos but more generic: - immutable - a/b boot - declarative (like talos) But with choice of workload, like docker, k8s, qemu

I dont get it.

Why do I need immutable if I'm just running docker?

Why do I need a specialized Debian variant when I can install docker on Debian or Ubuntu in a couple minutes?

And maintenance happens directly through the package manager, either through the distro maintained repo, or by adding the official docker repos?

This immutable fad needs to go away. So does flatpak and snap.

Linux already does the things these "solutions" are trying to solve.

Users can't update the base system without root, and applications should be installing dependencies in /usr/lib

I like the idea of something like this for swarm mode clusters; not sure if you’re focused on the home server aspect exclusively, but I’ll be following along.

Kudos to the great project!

Even if i don't see a personal need for it it's a really cool project! I sent it to a friend who is in the "wants to run their own servers at home but never finds time to tinker" stage

So I’ve just set up my home server with Ubuntu server, installed docker with one line and I’m off to the races. What’s different/ exactly the value prop of this? You mention maintenance, of what exactly? Is your server a slimmed down version to run on less powerful hardware? Genuinely curious as I’m new to setting up a home server so seeing how this would benefit me.

I noticed the code for the upgrade does not appear to be available. https://bitbucket.org/asklandd/lightwhale/src/master/

If this was built using zfs, it would have zvols and metadata in the fs for persistence. And the states would be perhaps more portable at a cost of .. zfs.

Not a huge criticism, life is about choices.

Very cool! I’ve been building something similar with a k8 focus for home serving as well! Excited to check it out.

This looks super clean . As a beginner, this is exactly what I need to avoid messing with configs. Definitely gonna try it!

Is the installation only imperative via the docker cli tool or do you support something more declarative like Docker compose?

This feels not unlike talos linux, but for single instances over k8s containers. Pretty neat.

Am I missing something, I don't see a single screenshot showing what you're asking people to install

So how is this different from Fedora CoreOS or bootc/RHEL image mode?

can't imagine a world in which I'd download a little known distro to put on my home network and use as a server. also, doesn't fedora already have something like this already?

if this is Cloud Run for my home lab, i am SO in.

first read looks good, excited to try.

The best way I have found to make something low/no maintenance is to keep it as simple as humanly possible.

And I don't think you can get there via this route. But good luck anyway, I would love to be proven wrong.

did you say anywhere what package manager it uses (couldnt find that info on the website)

If I had a firm requirement to have only one physical piece of hardware home server on bare metal to run further containerized things on, it would be running proxmox, because that grants the ability to run further QEMU, KVM virtualized things, and then to install docker containers inside of any KVM VMs. Even to use QEMU to fully emulate other CPU architectures if necessary.

Or if not proxmox, without a http GUI, just a boring debian stable x86-64 system to manually install QEMU and virt-tools, virsh toolset on to run QEMU/KVM things on with purely CLI management.

This is an interesting general concept but being limited to only running docker containers is a huge constraint.

I believe for anything home server (or even production), proxmox got you covered, it’s mature, stable, has strong community, and at the end of the day it’s still debian so you can mod it however you like. You can have containers, vms, firewalls, hdd zfs pools, backups, and more. And you can even use something like community scripts for easier installation, although always read the script before you install anything. I have also been playing with BastilleBSD too but I don’t think it’s there yet.

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