Mascot

I can't claim to be a layman in this, given I'm now nearing 30 years as a professional developer. I am, very intentionally, approaching this from a "regular customer" point of view, instead of as someone who is comfortable with a command line. That used to be what beta meant; feature complete but lacking content and polish. Then everyone started releasing alphas and calling them beta. At this point I suppose I'm quickly becoming the unreasonable one in having any expectations whatsoever of a beta, given there's a generation of developers now that have never known a beta to be anything but "some random stage between first successful compilation and full release". I hold you at no fault at all for the unfortunate timing of the Immich 2.0 release. It's the lack of communication and/or action for the months after the deprecation warning appeared, I'm expressing disappointment in and suggesting you need to reconsider your approach to. It's not the first time. A similar laid back attitude was present when all updates broke due to a TrueNAS update being required, that no one knew if was safe to perform or not. I think everyone would benefit greatly from a more proactive approach. My main point is that you have an ideal information channel to reach your customers: the HexOS interface. If an app is broken, make it show there. If manual action is needed, let the users know there. If there was no mechanism for doing that early on, perfectly understandable. But it should have become apparent long ago now that the information flow has not been working all that well. It does not seem unfair to say that it's not good form to leave an app broken for months without any indication in the interface that lists is as a recommended app. This should not be a thing nearly a year into selling the product, beta or otherwise. This is very much intended as criticism of the constructive kind. I just want to see improvements. That you are responding to this kind of criticism in a positive manner, is great. But, I haven't seen much customer-facing change over the months, which I find worrisome and I genuinely feel you (as a company) should as well. As for a refund, I appreciate the offer but it's not enough money to be worth an evening or more worth of hassle in reinstalling "just TrueNAS". I reserve the right to continue to be grumpy and disillusioned, but hopefully I'm succeeding in limiting my sharing to an endurable level. 🙂

My Immich was warning about the deprecated storage configuration before then, and it still is now. I've seen no new notice of migration needs since then. That was always the issue, it's not a new one. There was a separate issue with people who did not attempt to update for a long time after HexOS launched, and were then unable to do so. Is that what you are referring to? I get that Immich was beta, and that HexOS is still beta. But you charge money for HexOS and Immich was supposed to be one out of a whopping two applications you claimed to offer some level of support for. I didn't have expectations of extreme levels of support, but I did expect _something_ in a timeline less than several months. But, as far as I've seen over the months, absolutely nothing was done. The only thing that's happened since that post, for me, is that after months of warning about the forthcoming deprecation, it was finally implemented and Immich will no longer update. Over those months there have been a number of posts by people with issues both installing and updating Immich, with no indication anything had changed. No responses of "we fixed this, here's how to implement it," as far as I've spotted. Was the Q3 update even supposed to support automated migration to the new storage structure? Or are you saying you implemented something prior to Q3? How? HexOS did not support app updates before then. Was something supposed to have been deployed silently? If a solution that required an action from me was implemented, why did not HexOS notify me of this over these months? Did I miss a bunch of forum posts? The only solutions I've seen have been community posts working through how to implement the manual migration tasks as indicated in the deprecation notice. I really have no idea what you attempted to do, or how to even have noticed it didn't work. And I have no idea what you have tried to do now with the Q3 update. All I know is that there's now an update button in HexOS, that appears to do exactly the same thing triggering an update in TrueNAS does, except HexOS takes hours to realize it has failed whereas TrueNAS reports it in a second or two. So, from where I'm sitting, nothing was done and what you're now saying, after months of silence, seems to be "this is news to us." I hope you can excuse my less than enthusiastic response to that, as misinformed as I might be.

It might be a long wait. It's been a "top priority" since June already.

Regarding Immich, this has been a known issue for months, that they have chosen to ignore. I don't know if they fixed the fresh install or not, but if they did then wiping the old Immich installation and reinstalling it should sort things out, at the cost of any data present. The alternative is to follow the manual steps to change the storage configuration using command line and the TrueNAS interface. I don't think we'll be getting any help from the HexOS side of things.

Updating Immich is still broken. Please buy hearing aids. 😛 Sarcasm aside, can I assume there's no intention for the HexOS team to address this? It's been months asking for info/help regarding the storage configuration deprecation, the least you could do is let us know here and in HexOS that we're on our own on this.

The point was that if someone does not know a product exists, they can't buy it. The specific examples weren't really relevant, but if you feel games (software) and HexOS (software) are as different as it gets, we just disagree and that's fine. I was addressing the claim that the quality of the product is what makes or breaks it, not whether HexOS has a marketing budget or not. You can have a great product, but no one will talk about it if there's no interest in it. That was the point that was originally made. That the lack of communication isn't helping interest, so fewer people talk about it, less word of mouth. Having a great product is good, but it's far from all that matters. There were a few videos and some interest a year or so ago, since then it hasn't popped up much for me, so anecdotally there appears to be some truth to it. I know it's true for myself, I went from being an advocate to not mentioning it, because I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone. The reasons are more than just lack of communication, but it's a not insignificant factor.

In an ideal world, that would be true. In reality, people can't buy what they don't know about, no matter how good it is. Which is why movies have marketing budgets rivalling the actual movie budget sometimes. Game developers beg for wishlisting because it increases Steam store visibility, etc. Interest equals word of mouth, which can matter a lot. Or, a company can throw money at marketing and word of mouth is a lot less relevant.

Those would be bad examples considering at least one of them has not worked for months. They're also the only ones that they ever claimed to support, as far as I am aware. I've found how they deal with issues incredibly unprofessional, but there's still hope they'll improve. I believe the next update is intended to generalize app support as opposed to dealing with each individually. I'm guessing they're trying to add an abstraction layer on top of at least the most common configuration options to simplify things compared to using TrueNAS, which would be very nice and in line with the kind of simplification that is what HexOS is supposed to be all about. I don't expect they'll do anything to offer a migration path for those with existing Immich installations, but I would be very happy to be proven wrong.

It's not about delivering on a milestone promise, it's about how customers experience the product. Imagine being someone who thinks they're buying a "plug and play" NAS software, meant to hide the complexities. They particularly like the idea of local image storage. They pay $200 for HexOS. They install it, see Immich, and find that it doesn't install. Assuming this person was not involved in the forums, this was their experience of the product between the time app installations and updates stopped working in last year's TrueNAS version, and the delivery of the Q2 update where (if I remember correctly) there was a prompt to update TrueNAS. And now? Same thing. A new customer would again see a broken feature. Assuming they do go to the forums they see it's supposedly "top priority" to fix, but a month and a half later the response is "wait and see in Q3". Your perspective as a company seems to be entirely technology focused, but you have users now. Who are customers. They're not all geeks. They don't all read forums. I think it would be a good idea to spend a bit more time considering how they experience the product and any issues with it. That doesn't necessarily mean throwing everything else on the back burner to hurry up and fix an issue immediately, but at least surfacing information in the HexOS interface where most people would expect it to show up, might be a good idea. I can think of no good reason for instead letting users just try and fail to use a feature that is currently known to be broken. My intent here isn't to bash. It's the same type of feedback I give our R&D department where I work, when they try to release products that are fine for a technical person, but six months away from being ready for consumers. They can get laser focused on making the technical side work, and aren't always able to take a step back and think like a user. If you (as in the company) don't really care, fine, it's your business. I think you _should_ care more than you seem to be doing, is all I'm saying. 🙂 I won't flog this horse any more now. No need to respond, I just hope it's taken onboard as constructive feedback.

Can I add a quick(ish) whine? Immich. It's one of two supposedly supported applications, and sorting out its issue with HexOS using a now deprecated storage configuration was claimed as "a top priority". In June. I haven't spotted any updates in this regard. The deprecation message is still present for current installations, and based on comments here in the forums new installations have been non-functional for a while now. If that's the case, I'd call it unprofessional that it's still listed as a recommended app in the HexOS UI, with no indication of any known issues. Personally, I care much more about feeling like the current version of HexOS is actually being supported, than hearing about forthcoming features. I find the prioritization of what to focus on quite odd. This product is not a free alpha, it's an expensive beta. I think it's fair to expect better support of existing features, or at the very least UI updates indicating that something is broken and linking to up-to-date information (it should not be expected that everyone's active in the forums). Like it or not, once money was exchanged this ceased to be a hobby project, but to me it feels like it's still being treated as one. Even just information would go a long way. Is the plan to automate a fix of existing installations? Is it only to fix the initial installation process (if that hasn't already been done)? If no automatic fix is planned, will there be a step-by-step guide published for how to do it? Why is it taking so long? Instead, I haven't seen any mention of the issue since that post in June (though I might have missed it mentioned in some forum post, of course). This, to me, is not congruent with it supposedly being an issue of top priority.

Assuming a user is aware of its existence before the boot drive dies, I would think downloading the TrueNAS configuration file (system - general settings - manage configuration - download file) so it can be imported after reinstall would save some time here. I've never done so, but it claims to contain accounts, shares etc. Personally, I'd consider a user friendly way to recover from boot drive failure to be a core HexOS feature, but I've seen no mention of any plans.

I'd settle for the apps already supposedly supported to actually be supported. Thinking of Immich, which they claimed they would look into but I haven't noticed any updates on, and once the storage setup does go deprecated and prevents updating (or worse, breaks on an update) that'll be too late.

£2.22 per KWh? Holy smokes. I did a google and landed at .gov.uk address that claims there's a price cap in place that should result in an average price of about 25 pence per KWh, so how does that even happen?

It's not the uptime of the website UI I'm thinking of, that's clearly fine considering it's there to tell us the server is unreachable. The issue is the uptime of the connection between our HexOS installations and whatever the backend is. It doesn't mean the backend is down, but for whatever reason that connection dies and is not re-established even though there's no connectivity issue as far as the HexOS installation is concerned. I would hope it would be solved, but it's hard to tell. Based on some comments I've seen it looks like architecturally what we might end up with isn't a local interface in the traditional sense, but a container running what is currently running on deck.hexos. If that is the case there'd still be a connection happening, even if between services on the local machine, and we've only removed the internet from the mix. So if the issue isn't "unable to reconnect after internet blip", but rather that something at either end is buggy and crashing or dropping the connection regardless of network connectivity, it could persist. We'll just have to wait and see. Considering the TrueNAS interface remains available, this isn't much an issue for me, but I do find it a bit puzzling that the root cause appears to still be unknown after all this time.

As far as I am aware, that's pretty much what it is. The HexOS UI does not run on your server, it runs on theirs (Eshtek). HexOS is apparently bad at keeping this connection alive/reconnecting when it goes down. So the TrueNAS interface will work fine, since you access it locally, as will every other service you're running on your server. You just lose access to the one thing you paid for, the HexOS interface. 😛