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Raspberry Pi Projects and HexOS as a NAS OS
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HowTo Geek ☛ 5 open-source Raspberry Pi projects I'm self-hosting to save money
It’s never a bad time to think about saving money, and self-hosting your own software is a great place to start. With the help of my always-on Raspberry Pi, I’m hoping to buck trends and avoid subscriptions by hosting the following projects on my own.
Nextcloud
I’ve been an iCloud subscriber since I first ran out of Apple’s complimentary space, back when smartphones were tiny, and 5GB seemed like a lot of storage. I’m all-in on the 2TB plan now, and though I have 75% of my plan remaining, I’ve been eyeing up other cloud storage plans recently. iCloud safeguards devices like my iPhone, stores precious photo and video memories, and even keeps my Home Assistant backups safe, but it’s not exactly easy to use on other platforms.
Right now, I’m really feeling that pinch on Raspberry Pi OS itself, and though my demands for space aren’t astronomical, I’m looking to add some space that I can share broadly among the many platforms I use, from macOS to Windows and Linux distros like SteamOS. That’s where Nextcloud comes in. Though the name is heavily associated with enterprise-level collaboration and sharing, Nextcloud Hub is a suite of free tools that makes it possible to self-host your own cloud storage, host video conferences, work on documents, and run your own calendar.
Personally, I’m only in it for the cloud storage, but I’ll take the rest as a nice added bonus. Installation is pretty breezy thanks to the wealth of options listed over at NextcloudPi, which include bare metal installs, ProxMox virtual machine images, and a Debian single-line installation command that should work just fine on Raspberry Pi OS.
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XDA ☛ HexOS is shaping up to be the best NAS OS for everyone
HexOS, based on TrueNAS, launched at the end of November 2024 as an early-access platform for managing your NAS. At the time, and even months later, it lacked a lot of basic features that you'd expect from a NAS platform, even if you could still use the underlying TrueNAS system in the meantime. Even still, it was shaping up to be an exciting prospect for those looking for an off-the-shelf NAS operating system that could compete with Unraid or OpenMediaVault. Now, half a year on from our first look, it's meeting those expectations and then some.
HexOS is not a platform aimed at enthusiasts, and it's still not ready for most people yet, but it's certainly getting there. It's seen a year of rapid development and a slew of major updates throughout the entirety of 2025, making it significantly more than just a promising beta. I'd argue that it's close to achieving its vision of a "best of both worlds" solution that the space has sorely needed.