I'm looking for a NAS OS, the hardware is 2bay Intel n100 machine (AOOSTAR R1), I want to run a RAID1 with few containers (syncthing, immich, jellyfin etc.) all of it to be configurable by web interface, tried some systems in a VM (hardware didn't arrive yet), casaos has nice 'app store', it's a nice docker wrapper, but it doesn't let me manage any kind of RAID (md, brfs, etc), openmediavault is ok for raid, but the containers aren't one click wonder like in other NAS OSes, TrueNAS SCALE seems to be an obvious choice, zfs is cool and everything but it uses kubernetes and it failed to deploy immich for example (100% CPU), i know its called SCALE but kube is a bit too complicated to me (IMO I'm 100% competent but i don't want to tinker), and there's... xpenology, this thing let's me install Synology's DSM and it's a breeze, it deployed immich right away though i had to do it with docker-compose.yml, but in web UI. Also let's say im in favor of xpenology... should i go bare metal or use it inside of proxmox? any pros and cons of both solutions?
I dragged my feet for over 2 years after building my homelab and not putting proxmox. I highly recommend you start out with proxmox right away. It has its quirks and learning curve, but it's been a breeze after "getting it".
At first I didn't want the files inside LXC filesystems because I was used to manually poking at folders and such. But the periodic backup and restoration that gives you its the best, bar none.
I rebuilt my setup after a faulty data cable destroyed my btrfs raid0 filesystem (I know, I knew it was dumb, but I had 8tb at my disposal and I wanted to use it dangit!). Long story short, my borg-based Nextcloud AIO backups were borked and took like 3 days of research and external drive juggling to get some of the stuff out of them. With proxmox it's a single click to get the whole thing back up and running.