An open source project that’s easy to understand and use the sun. Will devour the Earth before that happens.
Open source is great, but first and foremost it is unfortunately designed by coders and engineers, not user interface, designers and artists.
In 20 years of self-hosting servers, apps and fiddling with things, I think I’ve come across maybe two programs ever that I could call easy to set up and use from an admin perspective.
There are plenty of easy to set up open source servers. I use a bunch of them. Here’s a few that come to mind:
jellyseerr
navidrome
jswiki
homeassistant
docmost
rustdesk
Those are all ones that only require three or fewer services in a Docker Compose stack. And the docker-compose.yml files are short and easy to understand.
There are plenty that are hard to set up, like:
jellyfin
nextcloud
wordpress
immich
mastodon
I’ve installed all of these, and they were not as straightforward, but not too bad.
Matrix is the only one that has taken me more than a day. And I couldn’t even get everything working. Element Call still doesn’t work after trying to set it up for two days.
There is a lot of variance in how difficult these servers are to set up, but Matrix stands alone as the absolute hardest, most convoluted setup process I’ve ever experienced.
An open source project that’s easy to understand and use the sun. Will devour the Earth before that happens.
Open source is great, but first and foremost it is unfortunately designed by coders and engineers, not user interface, designers and artists.
In 20 years of self-hosting servers, apps and fiddling with things, I think I’ve come across maybe two programs ever that I could call easy to set up and use from an admin perspective.
Such things just don’t exist
There are plenty of easy to set up open source servers. I use a bunch of them. Here’s a few that come to mind:
Those are all ones that only require three or fewer services in a Docker Compose stack. And the docker-compose.yml files are short and easy to understand.
There are plenty that are hard to set up, like:
I’ve installed all of these, and they were not as straightforward, but not too bad.
Matrix is the only one that has taken me more than a day. And I couldn’t even get everything working. Element Call still doesn’t work after trying to set it up for two days.
There is a lot of variance in how difficult these servers are to set up, but Matrix stands alone as the absolute hardest, most convoluted setup process I’ve ever experienced.