Unless you know what you are walking into ahead of time I would not recommend Synology to someone who wants to host a bunch of stuff and also wants a NAS. I don’t touch any of the container/apps stuff on my Synology(s), they are simply file servers for my application server. For this purpose, I find Synology rock solid and I’ve been very happy with them.

That said, I’ll probably try out the UniFi NAS offerings in the near future. I believe Synology has semi-walked-back its draconian hard drive policy but I don’t trust them to not try that again later. And because I only use my Synology as a NAS I can switch to something else relatively easily, as long as I can mount it on my app server, I’m golden.

You wanted a server and complain NAS is not just a server.

(Copied from an earlier comment of mine)

There are guides on how to mainline Synology NAS's to run up-to-date debian on them: https://forum.doozan.com/list.php

please don't do this to your synology

leave it to serve files and iscsi. it's very good at it

if you leave it alone, no extra software, it will basically be completely stable. it's really impressive

I bought Synology RS217 for $100 last year and it's the best tech purchase I made in years. The software it comes with is the best web interface I experienced in years. The simplicity, stability and attention to detail reminds me of old macs. I have macmini as application server and did not expect to use Synology for anything but file storage / replication. However it comes with a great torrent client that I use all the time now. We also use Synology Office instead of google docs now. It exceeded all my expectations and when it dies, I will immediately buy one of the new rack stations they offer.

I'm so happy I didn't buy a NAS, Synology or not. I think a proper computer running Linux gives me so much more flexibility.

You can run a container on Synology and install your custom services, tools there. At least that is what I do. For custom kernel modules you still need a Synology package for something like Wireguard.

If you have OPNSense, it has an ACME plugin with Synology action. I use that to automatically renew and push a cert to the NAS.

That said, since I like to tinker, Synology feels a bit restricted, indeed. Although there is some value in a stable core system (like these immutable distros from Fedora Atomic).

> Using LE to apply SSL to services? Complicated.

https://github.com/JessThrysoee/synology-letsencrypt

> there is very little one can do with this thing.

It has a VMM and Docker. Entware / opkg exist for it. There's very little that can't be done, but expecting to use an appliance that happens to be Linux-based as a generic Linux server is going to lead to challenges. Be it Synology, TrueNAS, or anything else.