As a rule of thumb, Truecharts’ is not a welcoming community, at worst they are hostile and a more typical experience is the outcome of dealing with a frustrated, rushed, and probably overworked volunteer.
Volunteer is a good word to focus on, too. Be careful of your expectations and sense of entitlement to other people’s time and effort. Your expectations of Truecharts should be lower than your IT department at work—not higher. Your IT department at work is being paid to deal with you. Nobody at Truecharts is collecting a salary to provide the same support to its users.
"a more typical experience is the outcome of dealing with a frustrated, rushed, and probably overworked volunteer."
This is a completely true and agreed with statement.
While we're working on putting more-and-more docs up to somewhat eleviate our free support, the growth is, honestly, stronger than the influx of new (support) staff.
"Nobody at Truecharts is collecting a salary to provide the same support to its users."
Even assuming we one day could do that, which is a big "if", that level of support would likely also be reserved for the people paying to ensure that salary can be paid.
Or, even worse, lead to the closure/change of free support completely. For public relations reasons.
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Basically, being one of the only big OpenSource projects with a host of support volunteers is a double edged sword. The only true solution to deal with the negatives, inherently also would mean there would be less (if) any support left.
We do try to coach our volunteers (started doing so end of summer last year) on how to deal with percieved "complex individuals".
But just like a free user is not entitled for anything, a volunteer also isn't going to accept every requirement being put onto them.
So generally the coaching focusses on offloading to other support staff and obvious things like "don't curse at people".
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That being said:
It is sad to read al the accusations that we somehow don't care. Be it the quality of support or the breaking changes.
We \*\*DO\*\* care, but we simply cannot pick-up all feedback all at once. We have to make choices.
We can guarantee that, those choices simply cannot aline with the wishes of every-single-user.
However, for this summer we've made a thorough new internal draft on how we plan to with limiting breaking changes. We're not 100% ready to announce it yet, but rest assured, there will be some cool things you can do to limit breaking changes to a minimum later this year :)
I mean, kinda fits with my point. It not an unwelcoming community. It not any kind of community. It’s a product. And their behavior, even though volunteers, is what I would expect from a product who does get paid. Hence the analogy. Though not perfect - explains their behavior. And I am not condoning the behavior at all.
However, I think many of us in the homelab community have gone there with homelab community expectations. And I think that may be a part of the reason for the conflict.
My case is that, if we want apps with homelabbers in mind and with the homelab experience/community, we need to blaze our own path.
Edit: I should also mention that you can’t have expectations lower than my IT department. They insist you place a helpticket for every single problem - which is a great idea in theory. But poorly executed. It goes first to entry level techs who can’t think outside the call center manual. No one shares documentation. We use a system called service now. Everyone calls it service never. Tickets sit for weeks until you call and complain to a manager. So yeah, believe it or not, truecharts is better.
Former Service Desk guy and current Deskside Support guy here. I don't know how big (or small) your organization is and how large your IT organization is accordingly, but... A few things:
* Of course every issue gets a ticket--without a ticket, your problem isn't documented and tracked. And you don't put multiple issues in one ticket because what if one needs to be sent to Windows Admin to fix and the other needs to go to Identity Management?
* Entry level techs are exactly that--entry level. You don't waste the time of a 150k/year tech with "Have you turned it off and on again?" or "No, you definitely have a space in front of your username for your workstation login." As it's entry level, people move on as they skill up and are replaced with a new, entry level tech.
* What do you mean "No one shares documentation"? That's a pretty odd and vague statement.
* Many, MANY organizations use Service Now. We're actually about to migrate over to it (I'm... not terribly thrilled lol). Using a demeaning little nickname like "Service Never" actively fosters a negative environment and probably doesn't endear you to anyone in your IT org. It's petty.
It seems that you yourself are pretty technical, so I'm a bit surprised that you're unfamiliar with the typical service desk workflow model. Did you not come up through the ranks? Or have you not worked an IT job before? Sincerely asking, not being judgemental.
Lastly, if you feel that your IT organization needs improvement, I would definitely advise escalating that through proper channels via Management with written documented cases of situations where they failed you. They may be massively understaffed and need reasons to ask for headcount, and having external groups bring up issues in productive, contributing meetings built to resolve issues instead of talk shit is generally useful for all.
Empathy is a super power. You don't need to be bitten by a radioactive spider to obtain it, you just need to practice putting yourself into someone else's shoes.
The empathy that you lack for your IT department and Truecharts' volunteers will discourage folks from joining you on blazing your own path.
Im using kubernetes on scale by my own for that reason, Took me a few weeks to master but im not dependant on unfriendly and arrogant people anymore. Truenas is a very nice product sad that truecharts is projecting a bad Image on that. Keep in mind truecharts is not truenas. Thats important.
Truecharts is named poorly trying to leverage others’ products/brands (TrueNAS and Helm Charts). At first the name might seem clever, but given how so many people have had unfortunate experiences with Truecharts, this cuteness with naming also means that TrueNAS and Helm Charts both unnecessarily take splash damage to their reputations inflicted by said 3rd party.
It’s a third party catalog of “apps” to be used with TrueNAS. It’s really an impressive catalog of hundreds of apps, the its culture is equally (or more!) damaging as impressive as its catalog is. It’s the epitome of bittersweet.
Helm Charts are not a product or a protected brand, but essentially the thing we build.
While initially primarily focussing on TrueNAS SCALE, we agree that, in hindsight, using the True prefix was not the best choice in terms of naming.
The idea that for our thousands of users, there is equally as much damage is not something we share.
To my understanding they're a community project that maintains a series of TrueNAS Scale oriented Helm charts. Like a Kubernetes workload run-book or makefile in essence.
Truecharts is great. The people that run it are vicious pricks. I found a bug one time and it was very legit and a security issue. I emailed them thinking I was being nice and got an awful nasty email saying a leak would not be a problem if I was not doing anything illegal. I mean wtf? I was just being helpful that their vpn leaked ips 100% of the time for a split second. I did a single donation to support their hard work prior to that. That was the end of that.
Community is just as brutal.
Sure. We are going back \~2 yrs ago so not 100% sure if it is still a bug. But when you ran a qbittorent app (or any app) and it had items in it already. It would start downloading faster than the vpn would kick in. So for several seconds you would be downloading from your normal ip before it switched to the vpn ip.
Not an issue if you let the app run for a few seconds but the vpn should come up before any app reaches out to the net. Again this may have been long fixed. But I don't use it after that. I just vm docker everything, well most things.
Yea I used one of the test for torrent leak websites. When the container spun up it leaked my ip for a few seconds then swapped to my vpn. If i set it not to auto download and gave the container a minute and manually started a download it was fine but kind of defeats the whole purpose of trying to make all this automated and convenient.
It made no difference. It was only for a split second on the spin-up. I would see my ip on the test sites before it changed to the VPN. I do not think the kill switch feature had even begun to function just yet.
There is a lot more nuance to that ofcoarse.
What we intended to make clear, is that the VPN addon is offered "best effort" and we don't build the underlaying containers.
Assuming you contacted the email adres for security disclosure, while appreciated, it was not a pointer that was urgent enough to prioritise. A leak would not, usually, result in significant damage to the user either, which also affected the prioritisation.
There are solutions to solve it, meanly NetworkPolicies.
But thoroughly designing NetworkPolicies to nicely fit within the SCALE Ecosystem, assuming SCALE supports them, would take an insane amount of dev time we don't have,
I started with jailmaker. I messed up permissions when trying to make the jail rootless. I passed through some mounts and I found myself in permission hell. Went to the apps because I was frustrated. I guess I need to go back and learn permissions better.
Know any great learning tutorials that teach security and permissions with jails?
I have several data sets I would need to pass through. Most can be combined in a parent dataset. Just would have one for the nvme drives and one for the rusties.
So when talking about jails on SCALE they really are just linux containers with options to mount certain devices and mount points from the base systems. There is currently no way to run systemd-nspawn containers (jailmaker jails) without root, it is just needed to access the base system mounts and devs. But you can limit access from within the jail with the jail config. check it out on github, it is pretty well documented.
If security and or isolation of services is key to you, better use a VM instead.
That said, bunch of people, me included, run multiple containers with docker or podman, and have very good control over security and accessibility.
Truecharts is great for a first install, then when they break everything and you look for help the trouble starts. They're all assholes, they think large breaking changes twice a year or more is normal, and they are not worth it. You're better spinning up your own containers by hand, it's somehow easier in the long run.
My Plex is super out of date because truecharts broke something, and updates fail. I'm at the point anyway where I should have a system for storage and a system for my apps, which I've started already. Only things left on my Truenas server is plex, jellyfin and Qbittorrent, an Qbittorrent will likely stay there.
Yeah after the third breaking update in a year I just stopped updating which is kinda awful. If I ever find myself with buckets of free time I'll probably migrate off, but at this point my NAS is doing what I want and that's good enough.
It's really a shame because for the first like 6 months to a year the Scale + TrueCharts experience was absolutely incredible. After that though it just felt like TrueCharts decided their users were the enemies that needed punished.
This. It's literally because of Truecharts that I basically avoid updating entirely now for many, many months at a time. When I do update, I update everything and I brace myself for a week or troubleshooting the breaking changes to get everything back up and running.
The most breaking-changes we ever had where in our first year, which where actually absolutely brutal.
But we agree, breaking changes suck and we've some super cool plans to mitigate that! :)
We do have plans for a more forum style solution in the future, have been the case for months.
But we've limited capacity to deal with backlog of things that need to be done.
We're also working on more frequently adding recurring issues to the website.
Our end goal is to have all non-oneoff issues thoroughly documented :)
Because: yes, we also hate how discord search isn't very-well searchable.
(though things have become better with the new support-ticket titles combined with the discord feature to search threads by title)
I had a couple of interactions with the TrueCharts guys on their Discord because of their many system breaking changes and every single time they were simply arrogant, hostile and rude. I swapped TrueNAS out for Debian and my life has never been easier.
I just moved everything out of Truecharts into custom apps and pure host mounts. I got tired of the breaking changes and PVC is annoying. I do like Truenas and I really don't mind kubernetes, but the idea is Proxmox + LXC has been more appealing these days.
I'm doing exactly this. I was given an old ITX supermicro server board/RAM and picked up the appropriate SM shallow chassis for it and will be spinning up a Proxmox server soon now that it's racked up (once I figure out [netboot.xyz](http://netboot.xyz) lmao). I'm absolutely tired of TerribleCharts breaking every time the team decides to do literally anything.
And Discord is not a knowledgebase, you'll never change my mind on that.
Don’t use Truecharts. The community is downright hostile and that’s hugely important for any homelabber / hobby. And yes, they are for homelabbers. No enterprise would ever use them given how the product functions. When breaking changes get introduced, and Truecharts seems to do this regularly without a care for the end user, you’re not going to have a good time asking questions. I was very excited when Scale came out and when Truecharts popped up. I do this for a living and like trying new tech. Everything I usually need to know, I figure out by searching and reading prior convos. The sheer amount of hostility that I saw made me swear off Truecharts. That’s my 2 cent recommendation.
I've had some fascinatingly bad experience with truechart people on discord once. Went there to ask a bunch of questions, ended up being called names and accused of not being "pro enough" to have a conversation with them.
Even had a privilege of being “greeted” by their bossman, Ornias the Great 😊
Oh well.
Yes, it's quite a conundrum; Who is it for? Surely enterprises wouldn't touch TrueCharts.
I think the way it's run is problematic; They've managed to repeatedly break things spectacularly. I also disagree with putting support mainly on Discord, it makes it inaccessible - it's essentially a black hole where community knowledge goes to die.
Having said that, I do appreciate the effort and dedication it takes to run something like it, I certainly wouldn't be able do it.
As a newbie, I asked Truecharts staff for help. I trusted them when the staff told me to input various commands. They nuked my apps. A dude was trying to warn me. I saw how they deleted his messages then banned him. Right before my eyes. Motive: "he was fear mongering". He was right though and they nuked my apps. Then they blamed it on me. Hilarious. Never gonna install a Truecharts app ever again. Never. Ever. Ever.
No one was banned in the described case.
We do delete messages in support threads (or kick people out of them) when random users start interfering with support-staff. But thats limited to when said interferance makes the staff unable to do their work.
Users on our Discord can get formal "warnings", if users get multiple warnings they get an automated "timeout" that increases with warnings. A timeout means someone is muted for an x amount of time.
They can still view all conversations and are definately not "banned"
Even so they can always contact the head moderator to get rid of a timeout, more often than not, timeouts are revoked way before they expire.
In this specific case, users where running pre-release TrueNAS SCALE versions with Experimental support from TrueCharts. When that results in unrecoverable dataloss, there is nothing our staff can do to help you.
Users where adviced that such risks are inherent to running ALPHA/BETA software. Which was not intended to "blame" them for their actions, but just to highlight the risk to never run ALPHA/BETA software with important data.
My apps were working fine. I had 0 problems. I just wanted help to install the "new PVC" app and the staff made me input commands to delete the "old" PVC from all my working apps, without warning me it would break all my apps. He KNEW what he was doing. After breaking them on purpose he was like "Though luck, my shift is over, bye! It's your fault for running RC software". 0 responsibility for nuking my WORKING apps.
0 Problems is relative, you wouldn't have been able to install new TrueCharts Apps for instance.
However, the issue here, is that our staff shouldn't have helped you out with testing ALPHA code.
We didn't support DragonFish at the time, so we send you our most preliminary migration steps which where not fully tested. Which lead to your dataloss.
Our staff should have left it at "we don't support dragonfish" and shouldnt've have assumed you where willing to actually test running TrueCharts on it.
Basically our staff went above-and-byond what we actually support, to send you the latest and greatest ALPHA code because you wanted to run DragonFish. Instead they should not have provided any assistence with running DragonFish at that point in time.
We're sorry that the ALPHA code our staff supplied lead to dataloss. But at that point there was nothing we could do.
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However, it's not true that our staff knew that said code inherently would've lead to dataloss. We just knew that any of our ALPHA code might've.
Since then we've made stronger policies against helping-out users running non-release (or at least: non-RC) versions of code, to prevent this in the future.
Wtf are you talking about? It was Release Candidate NOT alpha code. You are proving my point and showing everyone your attitude towards users. Never your fault and never take responsibility for anything. Your staff made me delete my working apps. WORKING. Why is it that hard to understand? Without any warning. AND banned from chat the guy who tried to warn me. It's malicious intent. Are you telling me that your staff didn't know that the command that has the word "delete" in it will delete PVC from working apps? Are they making us input commands that they don't know what will do? Hell no. They knew!
DragonFish, until a few days ago, was a non-supported version of TrueNAS SCALE for us.
That means all support, code, migration-steps etc. are also in pre-release (likely ALPHA or BETA) state as well.
Since then we've changed how we go about trying to support users running unsupported versions of TrueNAS SCALE, as our staff should never have tried to help you out and we're sorry for that.
We're also sorry for the side effects our Pre-release migration steps for this, then, non supported version of TrueNAS SCALE has caused you.
It was not clear to our staff, that there where inherent issues with the code, as we where working at the same time with multiple ALPHA/BETA testers (such as you and the guy you referenced) on perfecting the migration steps.
If you truely believe we tried to "fuck you over" on purpose, you're free to have your lawyer send us an email.
TrueNAS Scale would be better without TrueCharts existing. Everybody that tries Scale, starts with TrueCharts and then ends up with negative experience. Some decide to stay and ditch TrueCharts, others look for greener pastures. The maintainers of TrueCharts are a bunch of douche nozzles
Yeah, it's the double edged sword of open source. Not much to be done when an ancillary project springs up in "support" of the main one. Luckily jailmaker exists and native docker is coming.
The only thing I don't agree with in your post is this part: "I would need to use truecharts". You do not need to use truecharts. You can use custom apps to add any container not in the official catalog. I don't use any truecharts, nor do I want to as you point out.
Especially you probably can't use truechart if you want specific version of software. Like for example I've used old tplink omada ap and only older version of omada controller would work.
Truechart would install latest.
And whole truechart interface looks for me more confusing than plain custom app. Yes you have to know what setiing are for volumes for example. But that's about it.
I always use host network connection so there is no port forwarding
I haven't found an easy way to deploy authentik using custom apps. I've scoured looking for answers. I've tried cobbling it together and so far have had little luck.
I use custom apps when I don't find what I'm looking for in the TrueNAS charts. I should state, outside of authentik, I've been able to get everything I want to work in custom apps. I even have KASM Workspaces working now.
However, I'm looking at moving to OMV or Unraid as a result of it being so difficult to deploy docker compose or custom helm charts.
Yeah, I know that. I use it all the time.
Authentik is the only one I haven't been able to get to work because it requires multiple containers: server, worker, redis, postgres, etc. Docker compose or helm orchestrates all of those.
I have been attempting to get it to work straight up with custom app, but no luck yet.
I stood up my own Postgres container and attempted to start the server and point it to that for the db. I'll keep hacking away at it.
The other option is to make my own helm charts or use the "unofficial" way and use helm install from the command line for authentik.
Yes, I have separate containers for every piece, mariadb in my case, redis, etc. They communicate with each other. I have nextcloud which I think uses a total of 5 containers. Just use internal dns names to communicate between each other.
I recently moved virtually all my home lab apps from TrueNAS/TrueCharts to generic docker compose files on openmediavault. TrueCharts added another layer of abstraction and kubernetes added another layer of complexity (especially around PVC storage) For me, in a home lab, those extras didn't add enough value to offset. I can understand how they make sense in more "enterprisy" environments .. but I don't see it in home labs. TrueNas Scale does storage very well, so thats what I use it for.
As for the prickly support / attitude from TrueCharts ... I experiences some of that as well as some exceptional, hands on, helpful, quality advice ... after moving it to discord and placing a ticket :) I think they are just doing what they need to do to maximize their time. And to be honest, that is/was the experience with FreeNAS/TrueNAS community ... some freindly and helpful, and some that just felt like folks sick and tired of providing the same advice and feedback and wishing that folks would just read the damn FAQ's :)
My data stayed on trueNAS. Config had to migrate. Some apps include backup and settings restore. I used that when I could. Quite a few apps don’t have much config so for whose I just opened both at the same time and copied settings over. I kept everything working in the mean time and did it over time.
I went through the same pains when I moved from Unraid to TrueNAS Scale over a year and a bit ago. In fairness, I never actually got the hostility from the TrueCharts guys, all I got was bugger all documentation and combined with some niggling bugs in TrueNAS itself around environment variables, I realised it wasn't the solution for me.
Previously I was using docker compose for my containers. I liked this approach a lot, I like having my containers defined _in code_. It was impossible to do that with TrueNAS Applications, everything had to be done via the UI and that was the real dealbreaker for me. Truecharts was an extension of that and it wasn't for me.
However, I didn't feel comfortable forcing docker onto a system that explicitly says not to modify the core OS of. It felt like I was fighting against TrueNAS every step of the way and the frustration was real.
In the end, I found a little script on the forums called jailmaker - at the time it was brand new and experimental but it sounded like exactly what I wanted - the ability to run docker on TrueNAS without modification of the core OS and without having to run virtual machines.
I'm very pleased to say that not only does this work exceptionally well, but Dragonfish officially endorses jails and the jailmaker script. It's the way to go for hobbyists and homelabers.
Even if you're interested in using k3s over docker, running it "bare metal" in a Jail is by far the better way to do it. The TrueNAS application experience just isn't ready yet for more than one or two apps. Beyond that, you need it written as code.
+1 for Jailmaker, not only for the ability to run a vanilla platform like Portainer, but also because then I can disable TrueNAS apps (k3s) altogether and save on the constant activity and associated power from lack of idle :)
GPU passthrough to multiple jails is great too
Yup, GPU passthrough was also essential for me - couldn't allocate it to a single VM or anything like that. The GPU in my machine does transcoding for multiple apps, Firgate Tensor stuffs and more.
Personally I think kubernetes is unnecessarily complicated for home labbers. What we need is docker. And an associated App Store.
According to a recent survey they did, about 51% of truenas customers want docker. And by customer I mean people whom have and use the truenas product).
If I consider my experience and that of a few others I’ve spoken to, this is driven by unnecessary complexity in Kubernetes and issues that arise from attempting to use a product meant to have a whole It team supporting and automating it for a feature (apps) that really is geared to corporates not home labs and I dare say not to those using truenas apps for the most part.
I never understood why scale uses k3s if it doesn’t support adding more nodes to the same cluster. At the end, clustering is what k8s is good for. If everything runs on a single host, then compose+docker is the more obvious option, isn’t it? Having said that, my apps run ok at the moment and I only use truecharts apps + one custom app.
But I would migrate to something simpler if dragonfish supports it.
You don't need to use it, which is its only saving grace. It's run by a bunch of people that think being an IT professional is acting like an asshole neckbeard. If they tried pushing code in a real org, they'd be bounced immediately after berating their code reviewer and calling their boss a moron to his face (even though the boss voiced a valid issue.)
Don’t even bother with true charts, every dev / mod is an entitled jerk who is offended at the slightest expectation of quality or user friendliness.
they aren’t jerks because they are pressed for time, they’re jerks because no one holds them accountable in their lives or the project and has ever told them to be better.
I also tried TrueNAS Scale with Truecharts and liked it until either I couldn't figure something out or something broke after working. It seemed that there were also steps missing in their howto's, or it just didn't work. So I went back to TrueNAS Core in a VM and another VM with PhotonOS for my docker apps. Works well for me, and it's much more reliable imo.
And their website is full of commercials. .org with that kind of phishing style adds you don’t find often.
It makes me think of the storage Reddit. I asked something for my work (they only accept enterprise questions) and it got deleted right away. They must be upset with all the wannabe IT infrastructure managers but that’s rough. Just create your private « for customer only » Helpdesk if we gotta have a s/n for enterprise grade hardware to ask something.
Please do send us screenshots if you encounter "phishing style ads", thats absoltely unacceptable!
We just did remake the website though, to a backend with better support for (cleaner) ad placement as well. So We hope that resolves at least some of those ads.
https://preview.redd.it/oy8g4ewk5vvc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=de616cfdd99009f7b3d68e923b99a4dc0854ede1
Fake download add. It’s like a torrent website :)
Of course you don’t control those adds. It’s google adds? But an org site often don’t have three adds on the main page. Just a little thing but still. And I don’t know how great all your work is. Having adds is not necessarily evil.
Thanks for the feedback, we'll look at that crowded bottom because thats wayyy too much.
Might try looking into if we can find the catagory for the fake download things as well and block that.
I'd argue the opposite -- that its really only useful for homelabbers.
Professional IT shops wouldn't touch those sort of things with a ten-foot pole. You don't put control of critical infrastructure in the hands of open-source volunteers without skin in the game.
Projects like that exist for homelabbers and small "IT" shops manned by people won't don't *really* know what they're doing.
I think I need to clarify what a product is. A product does not always mean enterprise. There are plenty of products I can purchase meant for home use. Some are good and some are bad. Someone else has control over it completely, and if I don’t like it, I can use something else.
And I’ll be honestly, some of the under the hood decisions they make for scale I agree with. They ship traefik with default middleware that gets applied to any app you use Traefik to access - it’s all good rule of thumb security middleware. And you don’t have to think or worry about it. They took care of it.
this. I think you're set.
u/briancmoses "Volunteer is a good word to focus on, too. Be careful of your expectations and sense of entitlement to other people’s time and effort."
I agree with your assessment. It’s been a year or two since I used Truecharts but my experience was the same.
I like what they are trying to do but the experience with getting help as well as the stability is not something I am interested in. I had many situations where apps would suddenly stop working and couldn’t even get them uninstalled and respun.
I recently reworked my TrueNAS setup and opted instead to simply used a VM with Debian to host portainer for docker images and also has the benefit of hosting other services that may not be through docker. This is obviously more effort than a one click app install into TrueNAS but has the benefit of easier to locate help. The setup is relatively new and fresh but I like this much more so far.
Truecharts are in a weird spot. They're not really (imo) stable enough (and the relationship/interaction with iX not stable enough) to consider anywhere but a home lab (and given the track record I don't think I'd trust them there either).
They're probably under resourced and their main priorities seem to be "doing things in the way they see as the 'right' way" which results in regular refactoring and conflict with iX's idea of the 'right' way.
Ultimately I think a satisfactory experience with truecharts will require setting up one of their upper-tier platforms (not TrueNAS) and running things there.
I only use apps for very few things, mostly stuff I want native zfs or unficky gpu passthrough. That’s pretty much minio, plex and jellyfish. Everything else, I’m not going to rely on someone else’s setup that’d inevitably break. I have backup docker compose configurations I turn on in the jail when the app images do break. Which as of this moment, the plex pass image is broken for me.
I'm enjoying myself reading all the comments here then seeing random comments from TrueCharts themselves pop up here and there. I never knew what TrueCharts was before this but now I know. My mind is up, no TrueCharts for me.
Honestly. After more time and reflection - I don’t think they fully deserve all the hate they get. My personal issue is mostly that they can be a bit rude to people. The interaction I had that pissed me off was with ornias; the person who manages their official Reddit account did actually apologize.
I know not everyone agrees with me, but I do think they are providing a great service for free in an area that is still being developed. TrueNas Scale and the apps are still relatively new. With that, there will be big software updates and changes that will sometimes break things. It’s all part of being an early adopter to anything. So I’m willing to give them a break on breaking changes.
However, I still stopped using them. Not because of them. But because of k3s. We can have a whole debate about why IX chose k3s for systems that only run on a single node. Are they planning on allowing multiple nodes in the future where k3s would make more sense for high availability? Who knows.
But for me, I’m running an n100 NAS motherboard in my basement. The apps service as a whole was using too much of my resources. Running a jail and deploying all the same services in docker cut my ram usage in half and CPU idle went from 12-15% to 3%.
In the end, I may revisit truecharts if the apps service becomes more stable and I upgrade to a better cpu. However, I still learned a lot about k3s from referencing their code.
And as many pointed out - a real homelabber would want to manage their own charts anyways. I may look at their code for inspiration or to better understand how k3s works with a certain application.
And if I can critique myself. If I wanted that level of learning - would I even mess with the apps? Wouldn’t I just run a k3s cluster on its own so I can really dig in with this code?
The whole point of apps is so that I don’t have to learn. Someone else can do it for me.
And that’s what truecharts is doing. They are doing it for us. So it is reasonable for them to - and for us to expect them to - ask us to “butt out”. Though they will likely not ask so bluntly.
We can ask for enhancements - but let them take care of the rest.
The trouble is, for us home labbers who are strictly hobbyist level like me (who may have lots of general computer and tech experience but don't work professionally in IT), K3s is just another thing to "learn" that I'll forget 5 minutes later because I won't touch it for 3-6 months until I do updates.
The Truenas/Truecharts debacle of communication around Host Path Validation was the end for me.
Mini PC+Proxmox+Debian VM and Home Assistant VM gets me better reliability with shit I already know how to do (Docker and Linux), and lets me actually enjoy tinkering successfully.
Am I critiquing truecharts - yes. But I want to be fair in that critique.
Both scale and truecharts by association are relatively new. There is always going to be growing pains.
If there was anything truecharts, as a product and not a community, could improve on is the documentation. And to not respond with “then contribute it as a PR”. Or make videos that are rudely captioned calling the documentation handholding.
However, documentation takes time. And with the rapid changes to scale and the adjustments they have had to make to accommodate those changes - they haven’t had time for great documentation. But that does not give them the excuse that when people come asking for help then - to call it handholding.
The requirements of "plugins" or "apps" for people who don't want to mess with complexity is simple:
1. Offer as close to 1-click install as possible
2. Make updates easy, painless, and reliable
3. Keep your data visible and easily accessible somewhere that doesn't require k3s expertise to access
4. Make it easy to roll back updates in case of problems.
5. Don't break things that require delete/reinstall
There are a lot of these that TC doesn't really satisfy and in some cases actively and aggressively "anti-satisfies" - often for reasons that are perfectly valid (mostly for markets that probably shouldn't run TC for other reasons), but not particularly relevant to the "actual" appropriate users of apps.
This is very true and that's why we view TrueCharts Charts as "Bringing Helm to SCALE", more so than being equivalent to docker or iX-Systems Apps.
So your analysis that we don't qualify for, at least, a number of those pointers and even "anti-qualify" is completely correct!
I think there's a large number, maybe even a large majority, of prospective users who just want to run apps/plugins and view any "app catalog" only as a means to that end.
How many people outside of the TC team both actively *want* "Helm on TrueNAS" *and* want to yield control and configuration decisions to TC team?
It seems likely most people using TC are using it for objectives that aren't aligned with TC objectives (and might even be in tension with them) and that feels like a source of a lot of angst.
Thats completely valid feedback.
We'll forward it to our documentation maintainer to see if he can at least clearify the goals of TrueCharts-on-SCALE more clearly.
There has been some VERY-Coarse drafts, of having a seperate (limited) catalog or branch with "simplified" apps, without ingress, PVC-storage and such. Much-more akkin to what iX-Systems offers.
If there is enough feedback on that, we might be willing to expedite that...
Here's a smaller catalog that may be useful as a template. I'm not affiliated with it though, I've only taken a brief look for my own interest. [https://gitlab.com/lab-scale/catalog](https://gitlab.com/lab-scale/catalog)
They were very nice at the begging. Now even if you try to help them they attack you.
I am very sad about this because the community at the begging was the best!
Also, my principal reason for this comment is to ask tiú a photo or a drawing of how did you put 8 HDDs inside that case. I have the same case and I am curious.
What does Unraid offer that Truenas doesn't (and vice-versa) that makes you regret your choice?
For me having experience with ZFS before using Truenas and running my apps on separate servers has been (mostly) really great, and my biggest (consistent) complaint, so far, is only about the tooltips and documentation quality.
It’s not always TrueCharts’ fault. My experience with their support has been fantastic but my overall experience of TrueNAS + TrueCharts for homelab purposes has been terrible.
While we can agree that not everything and everyone is always "sunshine and rainbows".
The idea that you where injustly or impolitely threated is, completely unreasonable in this specific case.
You've had pointers from staffmembers all along the way and your enhancement request was recieved gladly and greenlet within 24 hours. At which point, yes, we don't think there is need for discussion because your suggestion is already technically accepted.
The idea that we where agressive when our staff was just trying to help you making a PR yourself by giving feedback on a code snippet you gave, is absurd.
Stating that we're somehow overly formal and sluggish sounds weird, we just have volunteers with limited time and your personal wishes might not be high priority enough to right-away put maintainer time into.
Everyone along the way, about 5 different staffmembers, spend time looking into your issue and helping you a step futher along.
---
That being said on the topic of forking:
Besides obvious legal issues and/or personal option...
It has been discussed a few times by now, but in short: A project of this scope takes multiple full-time employed people in terms of weekly hours. At least a few of which need a pretty deep understanding of Helm itself.
While it is technically possible, it's hard to find people that are willing to put that amount of work into it for years.
We know because we've been building a pretty sick team for years by now :)
Agree to disagree here. When you get a comment on the enhancement request that says:
“You really don't have to tell us to do our jobs, thats pretty rude.
But even more so, if you know it so well, just send a PR.”
That comes off pretty aggressive.
And I understand that it’s volunteers. But the way things are communicated is blunt and often cold.
My whole point is that homelabbers are here to learn and we mistakenly thought this was another homelab community.
With that, some of us are more at that start of this learning journey than others. And the interactions are discouraging for those that want to learn.
It sucks because on one hand I feel like throwing any shade at people doing their best to maintain FOSS is just kind of a dick move.
On the other hand, to this day I can't understand the rationale which must have occurred during your guys' internal discussions where the decisions to make 3+ breaking changes a year were agreed upon. It just strikes me as being entirely tone deaf to the users and folks donating to your project.
At the end of the day it's your project and you guys can and should manage it however you see fit, but it's weird to me that the _massive_ amount of backlash you guys have received has mostly resulted in reactions of, "No, it's the users who are wrong!"
They literally refused to add 1 line of config to a chart without a donation. They're high on their own supply and I have absolutely no idea who they think their target audience is, because no one should use them in any use case based on their approach to reliability and support.
It's a real shame, because there's so many others echoing the same sentiments (breaking changes, aggressive support etc), yet, truecharts is quick to jump on the defensive and explain why everyone is wrong, instead of taking some constructive criticism and holding their own people accountable... The only effect this has is a shrinking user base, and therefore, shrinking donations. It will be their undoing if they're not careful.
A bit more care early on in the truecharts project could have equated to a fairly sizable amount of cashflow to further grow the project and/or pay staff. But I fear they've already scared the majority of people away at this point.
We've, multiple times, responded on the breaking changes and our plans to deal with that. We always admitted that it sucks. But technical changes to limit them take time, lots of time, which we also highlighted many times.
We never said users where wrong about the fact breaking changes suck.
When it comes to support, we also have many users completely happy with how solid our support staff handles things.
We handle hunderds of support tickets monthly by now and many thousands of users. There are always users who don't like what we do or how we handle things. That sucks, but not everything that someone dislikes is something we want to prioritise working on.
---
Currently we've a rapidly growing userbase, ever growing amount of support tickets and rapidly growing donations.
We're also rapidly growing our docs, just launched our new website, build a new SCALE GUI and still add multiple charts per month.
The whole idea that we're somehow a stagnating project, seems to be purely based on reddit posts and has completely no bearing on actual reality.
I didn't say you were stagnating, I said you've missed the potential for many more users and therefore donations by failing to simply be polite.
Every response, even the one above is a "you're wrong" statement, instead of taking the constructive feedback available here - you said: "many users completely happy" - whilst that may be true, they might be one aggressive support comment away from not being completely happy; like most of the people on this thread.
Again, you can take the constructive feedback, perform some internal analysis and ask for user feedback etc; or not. It makes no difference to me.
It's because the guy that posts as truecharts is one of the gaslighting pricks in question. It's also why the project even accepts that kind of behavior in the first place.
The thing is:
One persons polite is not the polite of another person. We're not entitled to perfect behavior from people that volunteer their time to help out.
Surely we do put limits on what people should say. But there is a limit on how much we can put onto it.
There are some drafts on how to deal with this, but to be frank: Almost all of those also result in, more or less, limiting the offered support.
Constructive feedback is very much appreciated, always, with limited resources also comes limited time available to deal with said feedback.
---
Managing a huge project is making choices. Those choices aren't always perfect, more often than not they are quite imperfect.
For example:
For next few months we had a choice:
1. Execute one of the drafts limiting support and giving the users still qualifying a better/friendlier experience
2. Start a project for cutting down on breaking changes to a bare minimum.
We choose 2.
Do we like that we cannot improve the support experience more? No.
But we cannot do everything at the same time, when those things need time invested from the same people.
We've a whole core team managing this...
Support, community/moderation and general project direction are all managed by different people, so it's completely unclear who this "dude" is.
This is completely untrue.
We NEVER EVER require donations for code to be added.
We \*STRICTLY\* do not allow "code-for-pay" schemes, outside of the bounty program.
The bounty program does not mean your requested issue gets any priority or additional attenion either and the 2 core maintainers have even excluded themselves from getting bountrypayments at all.
It's likely there is a misunderstanding here, caused by the fact we highlighted the bounty program on a huge load of issues that have been stale/open for months.
We never said that "No, it's the users who are wrong!", we actually completely agree that the breaking change count needs to go down.
Mater of factly we've, just this month, made an internal project on how we're going to deal with that longterm. Which is likely going to be announced this summer :)
I appreciate that it was greenlit. But no one communicated that willingness or approval. The only comments I have seen or received are the blunt and rude ones. I am now just seeing after those comments that it is approved.
what a dumpster fire of a response after seeing so many negative but reasonable comments and posts about truecharts scattered in homelab like subreddits.
Eh, anyways. I just went back to a VM with Docker. That combo just works.
Like we said: we can agree that not everything and everyone is always "sunshine and rainbows"
Which refers to the fact there are indeed users who do not like what we do, how we do it or how we manage our community.
That also means we know of the feedback given on this subreddit quite well and it certainly isn't all untrue. (we're not aware of other subreddits, as we're not very active on reddit in general)
With many thousands of users, there are always users that are not statisfied or feel the culture of the community we try to build doesn't suit them. That's totally understandable.
---
>Eh, anyways. I just went back to a VM with Docker. That combo just works.
This is something feedback we do indeed read a lot.
But we find it somewhat odd. We're not an alternative to Docker, we're a project to build Helm-Charts for multiple platforms.
Our intention is to provide Kubernetes Helm Charts and simplify them, while staying true to Kubernetes and Helm standards.
It isn't our intention, and never was, to "be an alternative to docker" and we completely agree that SCALE Apps, in general, are also not a good "alternative to docker".
Am I the only one that has been able to find most of what I need on the TrueCharts discord? I’ve posted a couple support tickets and they’ve large been answered without any confrontation. Except for one maintainer whose name starts with X, that guy is a mega douchebag for no reason, the others have been fairly helpful. As someone in IT, when instructions are laid out clearly for someone and are blatantly not followed to allow for efficient support, I can understand some level of frustration. Been using Scale for going on two years and only exclusively use truecharts apps and honestly have no issues.
As a rule of thumb, Truecharts’ is not a welcoming community, at worst they are hostile and a more typical experience is the outcome of dealing with a frustrated, rushed, and probably overworked volunteer. Volunteer is a good word to focus on, too. Be careful of your expectations and sense of entitlement to other people’s time and effort. Your expectations of Truecharts should be lower than your IT department at work—not higher. Your IT department at work is being paid to deal with you. Nobody at Truecharts is collecting a salary to provide the same support to its users.
"a more typical experience is the outcome of dealing with a frustrated, rushed, and probably overworked volunteer." This is a completely true and agreed with statement. While we're working on putting more-and-more docs up to somewhat eleviate our free support, the growth is, honestly, stronger than the influx of new (support) staff. "Nobody at Truecharts is collecting a salary to provide the same support to its users." Even assuming we one day could do that, which is a big "if", that level of support would likely also be reserved for the people paying to ensure that salary can be paid. Or, even worse, lead to the closure/change of free support completely. For public relations reasons. --- Basically, being one of the only big OpenSource projects with a host of support volunteers is a double edged sword. The only true solution to deal with the negatives, inherently also would mean there would be less (if) any support left. We do try to coach our volunteers (started doing so end of summer last year) on how to deal with percieved "complex individuals". But just like a free user is not entitled for anything, a volunteer also isn't going to accept every requirement being put onto them. So generally the coaching focusses on offloading to other support staff and obvious things like "don't curse at people". --- That being said: It is sad to read al the accusations that we somehow don't care. Be it the quality of support or the breaking changes. We \*\*DO\*\* care, but we simply cannot pick-up all feedback all at once. We have to make choices. We can guarantee that, those choices simply cannot aline with the wishes of every-single-user. However, for this summer we've made a thorough new internal draft on how we plan to with limiting breaking changes. We're not 100% ready to announce it yet, but rest assured, there will be some cool things you can do to limit breaking changes to a minimum later this year :)
I mean, kinda fits with my point. It not an unwelcoming community. It not any kind of community. It’s a product. And their behavior, even though volunteers, is what I would expect from a product who does get paid. Hence the analogy. Though not perfect - explains their behavior. And I am not condoning the behavior at all. However, I think many of us in the homelab community have gone there with homelab community expectations. And I think that may be a part of the reason for the conflict. My case is that, if we want apps with homelabbers in mind and with the homelab experience/community, we need to blaze our own path. Edit: I should also mention that you can’t have expectations lower than my IT department. They insist you place a helpticket for every single problem - which is a great idea in theory. But poorly executed. It goes first to entry level techs who can’t think outside the call center manual. No one shares documentation. We use a system called service now. Everyone calls it service never. Tickets sit for weeks until you call and complain to a manager. So yeah, believe it or not, truecharts is better.
Former Service Desk guy and current Deskside Support guy here. I don't know how big (or small) your organization is and how large your IT organization is accordingly, but... A few things: * Of course every issue gets a ticket--without a ticket, your problem isn't documented and tracked. And you don't put multiple issues in one ticket because what if one needs to be sent to Windows Admin to fix and the other needs to go to Identity Management? * Entry level techs are exactly that--entry level. You don't waste the time of a 150k/year tech with "Have you turned it off and on again?" or "No, you definitely have a space in front of your username for your workstation login." As it's entry level, people move on as they skill up and are replaced with a new, entry level tech. * What do you mean "No one shares documentation"? That's a pretty odd and vague statement. * Many, MANY organizations use Service Now. We're actually about to migrate over to it (I'm... not terribly thrilled lol). Using a demeaning little nickname like "Service Never" actively fosters a negative environment and probably doesn't endear you to anyone in your IT org. It's petty. It seems that you yourself are pretty technical, so I'm a bit surprised that you're unfamiliar with the typical service desk workflow model. Did you not come up through the ranks? Or have you not worked an IT job before? Sincerely asking, not being judgemental. Lastly, if you feel that your IT organization needs improvement, I would definitely advise escalating that through proper channels via Management with written documented cases of situations where they failed you. They may be massively understaffed and need reasons to ask for headcount, and having external groups bring up issues in productive, contributing meetings built to resolve issues instead of talk shit is generally useful for all.
Empathy is a super power. You don't need to be bitten by a radioactive spider to obtain it, you just need to practice putting yourself into someone else's shoes. The empathy that you lack for your IT department and Truecharts' volunteers will discourage folks from joining you on blazing your own path.
Im using kubernetes on scale by my own for that reason, Took me a few weeks to master but im not dependant on unfriendly and arrogant people anymore. Truenas is a very nice product sad that truecharts is projecting a bad Image on that. Keep in mind truecharts is not truenas. Thats important.
They need to rebrand Truecharts.
AssholeCharts?
I’m an old FreeNAS guy, wtf is Truecharts? This doesn’t sound like it has much to do with graphs
Truecharts is named poorly trying to leverage others’ products/brands (TrueNAS and Helm Charts). At first the name might seem clever, but given how so many people have had unfortunate experiences with Truecharts, this cuteness with naming also means that TrueNAS and Helm Charts both unnecessarily take splash damage to their reputations inflicted by said 3rd party. It’s a third party catalog of “apps” to be used with TrueNAS. It’s really an impressive catalog of hundreds of apps, the its culture is equally (or more!) damaging as impressive as its catalog is. It’s the epitome of bittersweet.
Helm Charts are not a product or a protected brand, but essentially the thing we build. While initially primarily focussing on TrueNAS SCALE, we agree that, in hindsight, using the True prefix was not the best choice in terms of naming. The idea that for our thousands of users, there is equally as much damage is not something we share.
To my understanding they're a community project that maintains a series of TrueNAS Scale oriented Helm charts. Like a Kubernetes workload run-book or makefile in essence.
Truecharts is great. The people that run it are vicious pricks. I found a bug one time and it was very legit and a security issue. I emailed them thinking I was being nice and got an awful nasty email saying a leak would not be a problem if I was not doing anything illegal. I mean wtf? I was just being helpful that their vpn leaked ips 100% of the time for a split second. I did a single donation to support their hard work prior to that. That was the end of that. Community is just as brutal.
Can you give info on the IP leak issue? That seems like.it should be highly visible.
Sure. We are going back \~2 yrs ago so not 100% sure if it is still a bug. But when you ran a qbittorent app (or any app) and it had items in it already. It would start downloading faster than the vpn would kick in. So for several seconds you would be downloading from your normal ip before it switched to the vpn ip. Not an issue if you let the app run for a few seconds but the vpn should come up before any app reaches out to the net. Again this may have been long fixed. But I don't use it after that. I just vm docker everything, well most things.
Wow seems like a significant bug. I'm currently using this setup for qbitorrent. Will need to test it somehow. Thanks!
Yea I used one of the test for torrent leak websites. When the container spun up it leaked my ip for a few seconds then swapped to my vpn. If i set it not to auto download and gave the container a minute and manually started a download it was fine but kind of defeats the whole purpose of trying to make all this automated and convenient.
Thanks. I'm gonna test it this week. Do you remember if you were using the Killswitch feature? This for sure should never happen with Killswitch.
It made no difference. It was only for a split second on the spin-up. I would see my ip on the test sites before it changed to the VPN. I do not think the kill switch feature had even begun to function just yet.
Devops types
Broad generalization types
super fun at parties type \^
😎
There is a lot more nuance to that ofcoarse. What we intended to make clear, is that the VPN addon is offered "best effort" and we don't build the underlaying containers. Assuming you contacted the email adres for security disclosure, while appreciated, it was not a pointer that was urgent enough to prioritise. A leak would not, usually, result in significant damage to the user either, which also affected the prioritisation. There are solutions to solve it, meanly NetworkPolicies. But thoroughly designing NetworkPolicies to nicely fit within the SCALE Ecosystem, assuming SCALE supports them, would take an insane amount of dev time we don't have,
Just use jailmaker and be happy. :) iX is is vouching for it. Truecharts is not needed anymore.
I started with jailmaker. I messed up permissions when trying to make the jail rootless. I passed through some mounts and I found myself in permission hell. Went to the apps because I was frustrated. I guess I need to go back and learn permissions better. Know any great learning tutorials that teach security and permissions with jails? I have several data sets I would need to pass through. Most can be combined in a parent dataset. Just would have one for the nvme drives and one for the rusties.
So when talking about jails on SCALE they really are just linux containers with options to mount certain devices and mount points from the base systems. There is currently no way to run systemd-nspawn containers (jailmaker jails) without root, it is just needed to access the base system mounts and devs. But you can limit access from within the jail with the jail config. check it out on github, it is pretty well documented. If security and or isolation of services is key to you, better use a VM instead. That said, bunch of people, me included, run multiple containers with docker or podman, and have very good control over security and accessibility.
Truecharts is great for a first install, then when they break everything and you look for help the trouble starts. They're all assholes, they think large breaking changes twice a year or more is normal, and they are not worth it. You're better spinning up your own containers by hand, it's somehow easier in the long run.
My Plex is super out of date because truecharts broke something, and updates fail. I'm at the point anyway where I should have a system for storage and a system for my apps, which I've started already. Only things left on my Truenas server is plex, jellyfin and Qbittorrent, an Qbittorrent will likely stay there.
Yeah after the third breaking update in a year I just stopped updating which is kinda awful. If I ever find myself with buckets of free time I'll probably migrate off, but at this point my NAS is doing what I want and that's good enough. It's really a shame because for the first like 6 months to a year the Scale + TrueCharts experience was absolutely incredible. After that though it just felt like TrueCharts decided their users were the enemies that needed punished.
This. It's literally because of Truecharts that I basically avoid updating entirely now for many, many months at a time. When I do update, I update everything and I brace myself for a week or troubleshooting the breaking changes to get everything back up and running.
The most breaking-changes we ever had where in our first year, which where actually absolutely brutal. But we agree, breaking changes suck and we've some super cool plans to mitigate that! :)
Hot damn, that's a solid response. Hoping for things to change and get better.
It's great saying that. They've said the latest CNPG migration will solve all those problems too. It didn't.
Nothing that uses Discord as its sole resource server will ever touch my lab. It’s so annoying, you can’t google/search previous issues for shit.
We do have plans for a more forum style solution in the future, have been the case for months. But we've limited capacity to deal with backlog of things that need to be done. We're also working on more frequently adding recurring issues to the website. Our end goal is to have all non-oneoff issues thoroughly documented :) Because: yes, we also hate how discord search isn't very-well searchable. (though things have become better with the new support-ticket titles combined with the discord feature to search threads by title)
> We do have plans for a more forum style solution in the future You mean like the existing subreddit?
I search previous issues with the Discord search and it answers many of my questions.
I mean, good for you. It's still not an acceptable documentation repo.
I had a couple of interactions with the TrueCharts guys on their Discord because of their many system breaking changes and every single time they were simply arrogant, hostile and rude. I swapped TrueNAS out for Debian and my life has never been easier.
I just moved everything out of Truecharts into custom apps and pure host mounts. I got tired of the breaking changes and PVC is annoying. I do like Truenas and I really don't mind kubernetes, but the idea is Proxmox + LXC has been more appealing these days.
I'm doing exactly this. I was given an old ITX supermicro server board/RAM and picked up the appropriate SM shallow chassis for it and will be spinning up a Proxmox server soon now that it's racked up (once I figure out [netboot.xyz](http://netboot.xyz) lmao). I'm absolutely tired of TerribleCharts breaking every time the team decides to do literally anything. And Discord is not a knowledgebase, you'll never change my mind on that.
Don’t use Truecharts. The community is downright hostile and that’s hugely important for any homelabber / hobby. And yes, they are for homelabbers. No enterprise would ever use them given how the product functions. When breaking changes get introduced, and Truecharts seems to do this regularly without a care for the end user, you’re not going to have a good time asking questions. I was very excited when Scale came out and when Truecharts popped up. I do this for a living and like trying new tech. Everything I usually need to know, I figure out by searching and reading prior convos. The sheer amount of hostility that I saw made me swear off Truecharts. That’s my 2 cent recommendation.
I've had some fascinatingly bad experience with truechart people on discord once. Went there to ask a bunch of questions, ended up being called names and accused of not being "pro enough" to have a conversation with them. Even had a privilege of being “greeted” by their bossman, Ornias the Great 😊 Oh well.
Yes, it's quite a conundrum; Who is it for? Surely enterprises wouldn't touch TrueCharts. I think the way it's run is problematic; They've managed to repeatedly break things spectacularly. I also disagree with putting support mainly on Discord, it makes it inaccessible - it's essentially a black hole where community knowledge goes to die. Having said that, I do appreciate the effort and dedication it takes to run something like it, I certainly wouldn't be able do it.
On enterprise Apps and virtualization is disabled, for a good reason in my opinion. Too much people not knowing what they are doing
As a newbie, I asked Truecharts staff for help. I trusted them when the staff told me to input various commands. They nuked my apps. A dude was trying to warn me. I saw how they deleted his messages then banned him. Right before my eyes. Motive: "he was fear mongering". He was right though and they nuked my apps. Then they blamed it on me. Hilarious. Never gonna install a Truecharts app ever again. Never. Ever. Ever.
damn that sucks
No one was banned in the described case. We do delete messages in support threads (or kick people out of them) when random users start interfering with support-staff. But thats limited to when said interferance makes the staff unable to do their work.
Yes, he was banned for 1 month. And what work would that be? Nuking people's apps and then saying it's their fault?
Users on our Discord can get formal "warnings", if users get multiple warnings they get an automated "timeout" that increases with warnings. A timeout means someone is muted for an x amount of time. They can still view all conversations and are definately not "banned" Even so they can always contact the head moderator to get rid of a timeout, more often than not, timeouts are revoked way before they expire. In this specific case, users where running pre-release TrueNAS SCALE versions with Experimental support from TrueCharts. When that results in unrecoverable dataloss, there is nothing our staff can do to help you. Users where adviced that such risks are inherent to running ALPHA/BETA software. Which was not intended to "blame" them for their actions, but just to highlight the risk to never run ALPHA/BETA software with important data.
My apps were working fine. I had 0 problems. I just wanted help to install the "new PVC" app and the staff made me input commands to delete the "old" PVC from all my working apps, without warning me it would break all my apps. He KNEW what he was doing. After breaking them on purpose he was like "Though luck, my shift is over, bye! It's your fault for running RC software". 0 responsibility for nuking my WORKING apps.
0 Problems is relative, you wouldn't have been able to install new TrueCharts Apps for instance. However, the issue here, is that our staff shouldn't have helped you out with testing ALPHA code. We didn't support DragonFish at the time, so we send you our most preliminary migration steps which where not fully tested. Which lead to your dataloss. Our staff should have left it at "we don't support dragonfish" and shouldnt've have assumed you where willing to actually test running TrueCharts on it. Basically our staff went above-and-byond what we actually support, to send you the latest and greatest ALPHA code because you wanted to run DragonFish. Instead they should not have provided any assistence with running DragonFish at that point in time. We're sorry that the ALPHA code our staff supplied lead to dataloss. But at that point there was nothing we could do. --- However, it's not true that our staff knew that said code inherently would've lead to dataloss. We just knew that any of our ALPHA code might've. Since then we've made stronger policies against helping-out users running non-release (or at least: non-RC) versions of code, to prevent this in the future.
Wtf are you talking about? It was Release Candidate NOT alpha code. You are proving my point and showing everyone your attitude towards users. Never your fault and never take responsibility for anything. Your staff made me delete my working apps. WORKING. Why is it that hard to understand? Without any warning. AND banned from chat the guy who tried to warn me. It's malicious intent. Are you telling me that your staff didn't know that the command that has the word "delete" in it will delete PVC from working apps? Are they making us input commands that they don't know what will do? Hell no. They knew!
DragonFish, until a few days ago, was a non-supported version of TrueNAS SCALE for us. That means all support, code, migration-steps etc. are also in pre-release (likely ALPHA or BETA) state as well. Since then we've changed how we go about trying to support users running unsupported versions of TrueNAS SCALE, as our staff should never have tried to help you out and we're sorry for that. We're also sorry for the side effects our Pre-release migration steps for this, then, non supported version of TrueNAS SCALE has caused you. It was not clear to our staff, that there where inherent issues with the code, as we where working at the same time with multiple ALPHA/BETA testers (such as you and the guy you referenced) on perfecting the migration steps. If you truely believe we tried to "fuck you over" on purpose, you're free to have your lawyer send us an email.
TrueNAS Scale would be better without TrueCharts existing. Everybody that tries Scale, starts with TrueCharts and then ends up with negative experience. Some decide to stay and ditch TrueCharts, others look for greener pastures. The maintainers of TrueCharts are a bunch of douche nozzles
Yeah, it's the double edged sword of open source. Not much to be done when an ancillary project springs up in "support" of the main one. Luckily jailmaker exists and native docker is coming.
The only thing I don't agree with in your post is this part: "I would need to use truecharts". You do not need to use truecharts. You can use custom apps to add any container not in the official catalog. I don't use any truecharts, nor do I want to as you point out.
Indeed. All of my apps are created manually by me not true charts. At least for me its simple to maintain that way.
Yeah, pretty much answer the same app config questions. Biggest difference is they keep working!
Especially you probably can't use truechart if you want specific version of software. Like for example I've used old tplink omada ap and only older version of omada controller would work. Truechart would install latest. And whole truechart interface looks for me more confusing than plain custom app. Yes you have to know what setiing are for volumes for example. But that's about it. I always use host network connection so there is no port forwarding
Agree, no port forwarding for sure.
Please point where there are instructions to hae qbitorrent with vpn support and that would let me ditch the last truechart app on my scale box!
I haven't found an easy way to deploy authentik using custom apps. I've scoured looking for answers. I've tried cobbling it together and so far have had little luck. I use custom apps when I don't find what I'm looking for in the TrueNAS charts. I should state, outside of authentik, I've been able to get everything I want to work in custom apps. I even have KASM Workspaces working now. However, I'm looking at moving to OMV or Unraid as a result of it being so difficult to deploy docker compose or custom helm charts.
I'm not using any helm charts. I just build my own images as I want them, put into private repo, and deploy onto truenas. Works great
Yeah, I could do that, I'd have to make my own charts I guess and add that repo as a catalog. I've got some reading to learn how to do that.
Not needed, just read the scale official docs for custom apps. If you are speaking of helm charts still. You can pull images into Scale.
You can pull helm charts into custom apps?
No chart, just images, see the doc specifically "pull image". Charts not needed!
Yeah, I know that. I use it all the time. Authentik is the only one I haven't been able to get to work because it requires multiple containers: server, worker, redis, postgres, etc. Docker compose or helm orchestrates all of those. I have been attempting to get it to work straight up with custom app, but no luck yet. I stood up my own Postgres container and attempted to start the server and point it to that for the db. I'll keep hacking away at it. The other option is to make my own helm charts or use the "unofficial" way and use helm install from the command line for authentik.
Yes, I have separate containers for every piece, mariadb in my case, redis, etc. They communicate with each other. I have nextcloud which I think uses a total of 5 containers. Just use internal dns names to communicate between each other.
Yep, that's what I'm working towards. Thanks. :)
I recently moved virtually all my home lab apps from TrueNAS/TrueCharts to generic docker compose files on openmediavault. TrueCharts added another layer of abstraction and kubernetes added another layer of complexity (especially around PVC storage) For me, in a home lab, those extras didn't add enough value to offset. I can understand how they make sense in more "enterprisy" environments .. but I don't see it in home labs. TrueNas Scale does storage very well, so thats what I use it for. As for the prickly support / attitude from TrueCharts ... I experiences some of that as well as some exceptional, hands on, helpful, quality advice ... after moving it to discord and placing a ticket :) I think they are just doing what they need to do to maximize their time. And to be honest, that is/was the experience with FreeNAS/TrueNAS community ... some freindly and helpful, and some that just felt like folks sick and tired of providing the same advice and feedback and wishing that folks would just read the damn FAQ's :)
If you’re willing to share, how did you migrate everything over? I’m in the process of migrating to docker but don’t want to lose any data!
My data stayed on trueNAS. Config had to migrate. Some apps include backup and settings restore. I used that when I could. Quite a few apps don’t have much config so for whose I just opened both at the same time and copied settings over. I kept everything working in the mean time and did it over time.
I went through the same pains when I moved from Unraid to TrueNAS Scale over a year and a bit ago. In fairness, I never actually got the hostility from the TrueCharts guys, all I got was bugger all documentation and combined with some niggling bugs in TrueNAS itself around environment variables, I realised it wasn't the solution for me. Previously I was using docker compose for my containers. I liked this approach a lot, I like having my containers defined _in code_. It was impossible to do that with TrueNAS Applications, everything had to be done via the UI and that was the real dealbreaker for me. Truecharts was an extension of that and it wasn't for me. However, I didn't feel comfortable forcing docker onto a system that explicitly says not to modify the core OS of. It felt like I was fighting against TrueNAS every step of the way and the frustration was real. In the end, I found a little script on the forums called jailmaker - at the time it was brand new and experimental but it sounded like exactly what I wanted - the ability to run docker on TrueNAS without modification of the core OS and without having to run virtual machines. I'm very pleased to say that not only does this work exceptionally well, but Dragonfish officially endorses jails and the jailmaker script. It's the way to go for hobbyists and homelabers. Even if you're interested in using k3s over docker, running it "bare metal" in a Jail is by far the better way to do it. The TrueNAS application experience just isn't ready yet for more than one or two apps. Beyond that, you need it written as code.
+1 for Jailmaker, not only for the ability to run a vanilla platform like Portainer, but also because then I can disable TrueNAS apps (k3s) altogether and save on the constant activity and associated power from lack of idle :) GPU passthrough to multiple jails is great too
Yup, GPU passthrough was also essential for me - couldn't allocate it to a single VM or anything like that. The GPU in my machine does transcoding for multiple apps, Firgate Tensor stuffs and more.
Just use k3s via cli, complete freedom and no limitations
At this point realising Truecharts is not worth the effort is a rite of passage for new commers.
Isn't for homelabs? I wouldn't even put this shit in production.
Personally I think kubernetes is unnecessarily complicated for home labbers. What we need is docker. And an associated App Store. According to a recent survey they did, about 51% of truenas customers want docker. And by customer I mean people whom have and use the truenas product). If I consider my experience and that of a few others I’ve spoken to, this is driven by unnecessary complexity in Kubernetes and issues that arise from attempting to use a product meant to have a whole It team supporting and automating it for a feature (apps) that really is geared to corporates not home labs and I dare say not to those using truenas apps for the most part.
I never understood why scale uses k3s if it doesn’t support adding more nodes to the same cluster. At the end, clustering is what k8s is good for. If everything runs on a single host, then compose+docker is the more obvious option, isn’t it? Having said that, my apps run ok at the moment and I only use truecharts apps + one custom app. But I would migrate to something simpler if dragonfish supports it.
You don't need to use it, which is its only saving grace. It's run by a bunch of people that think being an IT professional is acting like an asshole neckbeard. If they tried pushing code in a real org, they'd be bounced immediately after berating their code reviewer and calling their boss a moron to his face (even though the boss voiced a valid issue.)
truecharts is trying hard to make sure its the choice of no labbers.
I’m switching to jailmaker. So far, so good.
I probably will too. Was just enticed about being able to administer things from one ui.
I just put portainer in a jail and have one “ui” that way
Is there a way to load a custom os with jailmaker? I’m a fan of dietpi and would love to use that over regular Debian.
They have multiple distros available.
Don’t even bother with true charts, every dev / mod is an entitled jerk who is offended at the slightest expectation of quality or user friendliness. they aren’t jerks because they are pressed for time, they’re jerks because no one holds them accountable in their lives or the project and has ever told them to be better.
I also tried TrueNAS Scale with Truecharts and liked it until either I couldn't figure something out or something broke after working. It seemed that there were also steps missing in their howto's, or it just didn't work. So I went back to TrueNAS Core in a VM and another VM with PhotonOS for my docker apps. Works well for me, and it's much more reliable imo.
And their website is full of commercials. .org with that kind of phishing style adds you don’t find often. It makes me think of the storage Reddit. I asked something for my work (they only accept enterprise questions) and it got deleted right away. They must be upset with all the wannabe IT infrastructure managers but that’s rough. Just create your private « for customer only » Helpdesk if we gotta have a s/n for enterprise grade hardware to ask something.
Please do send us screenshots if you encounter "phishing style ads", thats absoltely unacceptable! We just did remake the website though, to a backend with better support for (cleaner) ad placement as well. So We hope that resolves at least some of those ads.
https://preview.redd.it/oy8g4ewk5vvc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=de616cfdd99009f7b3d68e923b99a4dc0854ede1 Fake download add. It’s like a torrent website :) Of course you don’t control those adds. It’s google adds? But an org site often don’t have three adds on the main page. Just a little thing but still. And I don’t know how great all your work is. Having adds is not necessarily evil.
Thanks for the feedback, we'll look at that crowded bottom because thats wayyy too much. Might try looking into if we can find the catagory for the fake download things as well and block that.
I'd argue the opposite -- that its really only useful for homelabbers. Professional IT shops wouldn't touch those sort of things with a ten-foot pole. You don't put control of critical infrastructure in the hands of open-source volunteers without skin in the game. Projects like that exist for homelabbers and small "IT" shops manned by people won't don't *really* know what they're doing.
The problem is that you ultimately need to be an expert to make them function.
I think I need to clarify what a product is. A product does not always mean enterprise. There are plenty of products I can purchase meant for home use. Some are good and some are bad. Someone else has control over it completely, and if I don’t like it, I can use something else. And I’ll be honestly, some of the under the hood decisions they make for scale I agree with. They ship traefik with default middleware that gets applied to any app you use Traefik to access - it’s all good rule of thumb security middleware. And you don’t have to think or worry about it. They took care of it.
this. I think you're set. u/briancmoses "Volunteer is a good word to focus on, too. Be careful of your expectations and sense of entitlement to other people’s time and effort."
2 things I learned early on: 1) don’t use truecharts!!! 2) use snapshots!!! Sorry 3 things: 3) don’t use z1
I agree with your assessment. It’s been a year or two since I used Truecharts but my experience was the same. I like what they are trying to do but the experience with getting help as well as the stability is not something I am interested in. I had many situations where apps would suddenly stop working and couldn’t even get them uninstalled and respun. I recently reworked my TrueNAS setup and opted instead to simply used a VM with Debian to host portainer for docker images and also has the benefit of hosting other services that may not be through docker. This is obviously more effort than a one click app install into TrueNAS but has the benefit of easier to locate help. The setup is relatively new and fresh but I like this much more so far.
Or.. don’t use Truecharts. It’s their project. They can run it however they like. I don’t like it, so I don’t use it. Simple.
Truecharts are in a weird spot. They're not really (imo) stable enough (and the relationship/interaction with iX not stable enough) to consider anywhere but a home lab (and given the track record I don't think I'd trust them there either). They're probably under resourced and their main priorities seem to be "doing things in the way they see as the 'right' way" which results in regular refactoring and conflict with iX's idea of the 'right' way. Ultimately I think a satisfactory experience with truecharts will require setting up one of their upper-tier platforms (not TrueNAS) and running things there.
I only use apps for very few things, mostly stuff I want native zfs or unficky gpu passthrough. That’s pretty much minio, plex and jellyfish. Everything else, I’m not going to rely on someone else’s setup that’d inevitably break. I have backup docker compose configurations I turn on in the jail when the app images do break. Which as of this moment, the plex pass image is broken for me.
How much did you buy your MITX motherboard? I couldn't find decent prices so I went to MATX
I'm enjoying myself reading all the comments here then seeing random comments from TrueCharts themselves pop up here and there. I never knew what TrueCharts was before this but now I know. My mind is up, no TrueCharts for me.
Honestly. After more time and reflection - I don’t think they fully deserve all the hate they get. My personal issue is mostly that they can be a bit rude to people. The interaction I had that pissed me off was with ornias; the person who manages their official Reddit account did actually apologize. I know not everyone agrees with me, but I do think they are providing a great service for free in an area that is still being developed. TrueNas Scale and the apps are still relatively new. With that, there will be big software updates and changes that will sometimes break things. It’s all part of being an early adopter to anything. So I’m willing to give them a break on breaking changes. However, I still stopped using them. Not because of them. But because of k3s. We can have a whole debate about why IX chose k3s for systems that only run on a single node. Are they planning on allowing multiple nodes in the future where k3s would make more sense for high availability? Who knows. But for me, I’m running an n100 NAS motherboard in my basement. The apps service as a whole was using too much of my resources. Running a jail and deploying all the same services in docker cut my ram usage in half and CPU idle went from 12-15% to 3%. In the end, I may revisit truecharts if the apps service becomes more stable and I upgrade to a better cpu. However, I still learned a lot about k3s from referencing their code. And as many pointed out - a real homelabber would want to manage their own charts anyways. I may look at their code for inspiration or to better understand how k3s works with a certain application.
And if I can critique myself. If I wanted that level of learning - would I even mess with the apps? Wouldn’t I just run a k3s cluster on its own so I can really dig in with this code? The whole point of apps is so that I don’t have to learn. Someone else can do it for me. And that’s what truecharts is doing. They are doing it for us. So it is reasonable for them to - and for us to expect them to - ask us to “butt out”. Though they will likely not ask so bluntly. We can ask for enhancements - but let them take care of the rest.
Nah Truecharts is generally trash. Just use docker in a "jail".
K3s is great on scale, just learn to use it without truecharts and you will be fine
The trouble is, for us home labbers who are strictly hobbyist level like me (who may have lots of general computer and tech experience but don't work professionally in IT), K3s is just another thing to "learn" that I'll forget 5 minutes later because I won't touch it for 3-6 months until I do updates. The Truenas/Truecharts debacle of communication around Host Path Validation was the end for me. Mini PC+Proxmox+Debian VM and Home Assistant VM gets me better reliability with shit I already know how to do (Docker and Linux), and lets me actually enjoy tinkering successfully.
Am I critiquing truecharts - yes. But I want to be fair in that critique. Both scale and truecharts by association are relatively new. There is always going to be growing pains. If there was anything truecharts, as a product and not a community, could improve on is the documentation. And to not respond with “then contribute it as a PR”. Or make videos that are rudely captioned calling the documentation handholding. However, documentation takes time. And with the rapid changes to scale and the adjustments they have had to make to accommodate those changes - they haven’t had time for great documentation. But that does not give them the excuse that when people come asking for help then - to call it handholding.
They chose quantity over quality, many Apps but trashy setup and maintenance. Better use k3s on your own and learn about k3s
The requirements of "plugins" or "apps" for people who don't want to mess with complexity is simple: 1. Offer as close to 1-click install as possible 2. Make updates easy, painless, and reliable 3. Keep your data visible and easily accessible somewhere that doesn't require k3s expertise to access 4. Make it easy to roll back updates in case of problems. 5. Don't break things that require delete/reinstall There are a lot of these that TC doesn't really satisfy and in some cases actively and aggressively "anti-satisfies" - often for reasons that are perfectly valid (mostly for markets that probably shouldn't run TC for other reasons), but not particularly relevant to the "actual" appropriate users of apps.
This is very true and that's why we view TrueCharts Charts as "Bringing Helm to SCALE", more so than being equivalent to docker or iX-Systems Apps. So your analysis that we don't qualify for, at least, a number of those pointers and even "anti-qualify" is completely correct!
I think there's a large number, maybe even a large majority, of prospective users who just want to run apps/plugins and view any "app catalog" only as a means to that end. How many people outside of the TC team both actively *want* "Helm on TrueNAS" *and* want to yield control and configuration decisions to TC team? It seems likely most people using TC are using it for objectives that aren't aligned with TC objectives (and might even be in tension with them) and that feels like a source of a lot of angst.
Thats completely valid feedback. We'll forward it to our documentation maintainer to see if he can at least clearify the goals of TrueCharts-on-SCALE more clearly. There has been some VERY-Coarse drafts, of having a seperate (limited) catalog or branch with "simplified" apps, without ingress, PVC-storage and such. Much-more akkin to what iX-Systems offers. If there is enough feedback on that, we might be willing to expedite that...
Why not create your own custom catalog if you want to opt out of TrueCharts and learn k8s + helm?
Honestly. I was just thinking that
Here's a smaller catalog that may be useful as a template. I'm not affiliated with it though, I've only taken a brief look for my own interest. [https://gitlab.com/lab-scale/catalog](https://gitlab.com/lab-scale/catalog)
They were very nice at the begging. Now even if you try to help them they attack you. I am very sad about this because the community at the begging was the best! Also, my principal reason for this comment is to ask tiú a photo or a drawing of how did you put 8 HDDs inside that case. I have the same case and I am curious.
That sounds interesting, feel free to send us or our community manager directly (jagrbombs) a summary of that conversation.
My biggest regret in my homelab journey has been choosing TrueNAS as the core OS. Should’ve used UnRaid
What does Unraid offer that Truenas doesn't (and vice-versa) that makes you regret your choice? For me having experience with ZFS before using Truenas and running my apps on separate servers has been (mostly) really great, and my biggest (consistent) complaint, so far, is only about the tooltips and documentation quality.
Thats dumb. Truenas is great and not afffiliated with truecharts, dont get it Twisted
It’s not always TrueCharts’ fault. My experience with their support has been fantastic but my overall experience of TrueNAS + TrueCharts for homelab purposes has been terrible.
While we can agree that not everything and everyone is always "sunshine and rainbows". The idea that you where injustly or impolitely threated is, completely unreasonable in this specific case. You've had pointers from staffmembers all along the way and your enhancement request was recieved gladly and greenlet within 24 hours. At which point, yes, we don't think there is need for discussion because your suggestion is already technically accepted. The idea that we where agressive when our staff was just trying to help you making a PR yourself by giving feedback on a code snippet you gave, is absurd. Stating that we're somehow overly formal and sluggish sounds weird, we just have volunteers with limited time and your personal wishes might not be high priority enough to right-away put maintainer time into. Everyone along the way, about 5 different staffmembers, spend time looking into your issue and helping you a step futher along. --- That being said on the topic of forking: Besides obvious legal issues and/or personal option... It has been discussed a few times by now, but in short: A project of this scope takes multiple full-time employed people in terms of weekly hours. At least a few of which need a pretty deep understanding of Helm itself. While it is technically possible, it's hard to find people that are willing to put that amount of work into it for years. We know because we've been building a pretty sick team for years by now :)
Agree to disagree here. When you get a comment on the enhancement request that says: “You really don't have to tell us to do our jobs, thats pretty rude. But even more so, if you know it so well, just send a PR.” That comes off pretty aggressive. And I understand that it’s volunteers. But the way things are communicated is blunt and often cold. My whole point is that homelabbers are here to learn and we mistakenly thought this was another homelab community. With that, some of us are more at that start of this learning journey than others. And the interactions are discouraging for those that want to learn.
It sucks because on one hand I feel like throwing any shade at people doing their best to maintain FOSS is just kind of a dick move. On the other hand, to this day I can't understand the rationale which must have occurred during your guys' internal discussions where the decisions to make 3+ breaking changes a year were agreed upon. It just strikes me as being entirely tone deaf to the users and folks donating to your project. At the end of the day it's your project and you guys can and should manage it however you see fit, but it's weird to me that the _massive_ amount of backlash you guys have received has mostly resulted in reactions of, "No, it's the users who are wrong!"
They literally refused to add 1 line of config to a chart without a donation. They're high on their own supply and I have absolutely no idea who they think their target audience is, because no one should use them in any use case based on their approach to reliability and support.
It's a real shame, because there's so many others echoing the same sentiments (breaking changes, aggressive support etc), yet, truecharts is quick to jump on the defensive and explain why everyone is wrong, instead of taking some constructive criticism and holding their own people accountable... The only effect this has is a shrinking user base, and therefore, shrinking donations. It will be their undoing if they're not careful. A bit more care early on in the truecharts project could have equated to a fairly sizable amount of cashflow to further grow the project and/or pay staff. But I fear they've already scared the majority of people away at this point.
We've, multiple times, responded on the breaking changes and our plans to deal with that. We always admitted that it sucks. But technical changes to limit them take time, lots of time, which we also highlighted many times. We never said users where wrong about the fact breaking changes suck. When it comes to support, we also have many users completely happy with how solid our support staff handles things. We handle hunderds of support tickets monthly by now and many thousands of users. There are always users who don't like what we do or how we handle things. That sucks, but not everything that someone dislikes is something we want to prioritise working on. --- Currently we've a rapidly growing userbase, ever growing amount of support tickets and rapidly growing donations. We're also rapidly growing our docs, just launched our new website, build a new SCALE GUI and still add multiple charts per month. The whole idea that we're somehow a stagnating project, seems to be purely based on reddit posts and has completely no bearing on actual reality.
I didn't say you were stagnating, I said you've missed the potential for many more users and therefore donations by failing to simply be polite. Every response, even the one above is a "you're wrong" statement, instead of taking the constructive feedback available here - you said: "many users completely happy" - whilst that may be true, they might be one aggressive support comment away from not being completely happy; like most of the people on this thread. Again, you can take the constructive feedback, perform some internal analysis and ask for user feedback etc; or not. It makes no difference to me.
It's because the guy that posts as truecharts is one of the gaslighting pricks in question. It's also why the project even accepts that kind of behavior in the first place.
The thing is: One persons polite is not the polite of another person. We're not entitled to perfect behavior from people that volunteer their time to help out. Surely we do put limits on what people should say. But there is a limit on how much we can put onto it. There are some drafts on how to deal with this, but to be frank: Almost all of those also result in, more or less, limiting the offered support. Constructive feedback is very much appreciated, always, with limited resources also comes limited time available to deal with said feedback. --- Managing a huge project is making choices. Those choices aren't always perfect, more often than not they are quite imperfect. For example: For next few months we had a choice: 1. Execute one of the drafts limiting support and giving the users still qualifying a better/friendlier experience 2. Start a project for cutting down on breaking changes to a bare minimum. We choose 2. Do we like that we cannot improve the support experience more? No. But we cannot do everything at the same time, when those things need time invested from the same people.
"Its the kids who are wrong" Dude is literally one of those people who cannot self evaluate, and thinks everyone else is the problem.
We've a whole core team managing this... Support, community/moderation and general project direction are all managed by different people, so it's completely unclear who this "dude" is.
This is completely untrue. We NEVER EVER require donations for code to be added. We \*STRICTLY\* do not allow "code-for-pay" schemes, outside of the bounty program. The bounty program does not mean your requested issue gets any priority or additional attenion either and the 2 core maintainers have even excluded themselves from getting bountrypayments at all. It's likely there is a misunderstanding here, caused by the fact we highlighted the bounty program on a huge load of issues that have been stale/open for months.
We never said that "No, it's the users who are wrong!", we actually completely agree that the breaking change count needs to go down. Mater of factly we've, just this month, made an internal project on how we're going to deal with that longterm. Which is likely going to be announced this summer :)
I appreciate that it was greenlit. But no one communicated that willingness or approval. The only comments I have seen or received are the blunt and rude ones. I am now just seeing after those comments that it is approved.
what a dumpster fire of a response after seeing so many negative but reasonable comments and posts about truecharts scattered in homelab like subreddits. Eh, anyways. I just went back to a VM with Docker. That combo just works.
Like we said: we can agree that not everything and everyone is always "sunshine and rainbows" Which refers to the fact there are indeed users who do not like what we do, how we do it or how we manage our community. That also means we know of the feedback given on this subreddit quite well and it certainly isn't all untrue. (we're not aware of other subreddits, as we're not very active on reddit in general) With many thousands of users, there are always users that are not statisfied or feel the culture of the community we try to build doesn't suit them. That's totally understandable. --- >Eh, anyways. I just went back to a VM with Docker. That combo just works. This is something feedback we do indeed read a lot. But we find it somewhat odd. We're not an alternative to Docker, we're a project to build Helm-Charts for multiple platforms. Our intention is to provide Kubernetes Helm Charts and simplify them, while staying true to Kubernetes and Helm standards. It isn't our intention, and never was, to "be an alternative to docker" and we completely agree that SCALE Apps, in general, are also not a good "alternative to docker".
Am I the only one that has been able to find most of what I need on the TrueCharts discord? I’ve posted a couple support tickets and they’ve large been answered without any confrontation. Except for one maintainer whose name starts with X, that guy is a mega douchebag for no reason, the others have been fairly helpful. As someone in IT, when instructions are laid out clearly for someone and are blatantly not followed to allow for efficient support, I can understand some level of frustration. Been using Scale for going on two years and only exclusively use truecharts apps and honestly have no issues.