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Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

> The experience needs to be more like installing an app on a phone or a game on a console and with automated backups and easy restore. Self hosting will never come back if we are still expecting people to manage servers like it’s 1985.

It exists: https://yunohost.org/#/. Install the distro, and then it's all clickety-clicks for all your apps (which are softwares like nextcloud, cryptpad, bitwarden, bitter, etc..)

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That is definietely the idea, but in practice all the app stores suffer from same problems - mainly that keeping the apps up to date is a lot of thankless work.

Yunohost is mainly full of community contributions, quite a few of which have been abandoned. Some are stuck on old versions, some use migration scripts which may or may not do things the correct Yunohost way, some use migration scripts with bugs which can lead to data loss. The front end is slick, but it's the wild west behind the scenes. There's not even a mechanism for regularly reviewing if apps have been abandoned - I've manually reported a couple.

Cloudron is probably better than most as they have a financial incentive, but then that targets their apps towards "professional" users.

FreeNAS kinds of sits in that area, but it suffers from some of the same community contribution problem. It’s definitely hit or miss. I’m thinking the solution has to be like 10 core things that are rock solid rather than dozens of things that range from excellent to hasn’t-worked-in-2-years.

“Install the distro” is full stop for most people.

The backup and restore also has to be continuous and seamless.

Cannot upvote this enough

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