Domestic Service

Home servers are on the rise and if you can host your services yourself, you will benefit in several ways. Besides saving on the monthly costs for subscription services or a rented virtual server from a hosting service provider, regaining your data sovereignty can be an important motivation. The data stays where it belongs: on your network. Of course, this requires a configuration that takes security seriously.

With expert knowledge, you could build a home server from scratch and run the required services on it using Docker. But deployment-ready solutions such as Proxmox or Unraid will help you achieve your goal in a far easier way. The catch is that they still require a certain amount of knowledge and understanding, at least during the setup phase. CasaOS [1] shows that there are also lean solutions that offer everything many users need. You can preview a demo version of the system on the website. I have tested the software on a Raspberry Pi 5, but a Raspberry Pi 4 should work fine as well.

No Operating System

Shanghai-based IceWhale Technology Ltd. develops CasaOS for its own ZimaBoards [2], which have attracted a kind of cult following over the past year. The name CasaOS is somewhat misleading, as it suggests that it is an operating system. However, CasaOS is actually a browser-based graphical user interface that requires an operating system to be in place.

[...]