Sandstorm is in need of more coders to help maintain and update apps, but it's not abandoned. I use it, both personally and professionally.

It results in a better experience for end-users because applications are actually sandboxed. This (mercifully) means that any security issues in the out-of-date applications does not become a cause for panic. The downside is that packaging those applications is not trivial.

I always check for yunohost on these self-hosting threads. Standing up a yunohost on my raspberry pie has been on my to-do list for a long time.

Unfortunately their default for my raspberry pie didn't "just work" on the Saturday evening I tried it. It was my first foray with that raspberry pie, so installed a different server OS and spent the rest of the evening setting up a basic server for an HTML file and learning more about SSH. That was my experience as a non-IT engineer. I'd be interested in other people's experiences using yunohost (or sandstorm for that matter).

Maybe the solution isn't to make an idiot-proof stack of tech. Maybe we need a central repo of tutorials and how-tos so that any idiot could self host? Something better than the scattered YouTubes and blogs I remember seeing when I Googled after this.

I think we need more than tutorials. The actual software is just harder to host than it needs to be. What we need is some kind of standard where a tool can just automatically plug it in to the stack, start up the docker container, route nginx in, setup certificates automatically, set up SSO automatically in a standard way, Backup the data in a standard way, etc.

These 1 click install services like yuno host achieve it through huge amounts of work per app and patches over upstream.

Problem is its a monster of a job that requires upstream projects to be onboard and ultimately most of these tools are meant for enterprises to run who just have a dedicated ops person so complexity and maintenance are less of an issue.

It's kinda sad that something like yunohost is still the best "just working"-solution we have at the moment. I tested it some weeks ago for a homelab-server, and holy crap was this a poor experience.

But the general problem with those projects is, they all are packaging their own apps, and most of those have a very low number available. Some of thise apps are outdated, or are not well tested. It's quite strange that we have dozens of linux-distributions, each with thousand of packages, yet we have no good solution that actually works well enough.

You either have solutions which are hiding everything in a tanglement which is hard to understand, or you must do all the work yourself, or you live with the in-betweens which offer only a handful of apps. Maybe in another 20 years we have something workable on all levels...

> the best "just works" experience but I didn't like that it wasn't using any kind of containerization which has caused them issues with shared libraries like PHP being difficult to update. As well as security concerns about one insecure app giving access to the whole server.

imo the reproducability guarantees of docker aren't enough and domething like NixOS is needed.