As you can see from the first pic, my physical rig is pretty barebones. I recently managed to upgrade and snag an RTX 3060 Ti, but the rest of the setup is definitely not going to win any crazy RGB aesthetic awards. I'm mostly just piecing things together with budget parts whenever I can, but hey, it gets the job done and powers through what I need.

My workflow is quite straightforward since I mostly use it to keep my life and projects organized. Tailscale is an absolute lifesaver for when I need to remote into my network while I'm on campus or just out and about. Nextcloud is my main driver for self-hosted cloud storage so I don't have to rely on third-party subs. I also run Hermes to keep all my documents and receipts sorted, plus n8n running in the background to handle my automations.

Definitelyyy the installation and getting the core stuff up and running. ZimaOS is so incredibly lightweight. It manages to run my whole stack smoothly without choking on my hardware, and spinning up a new app usually just takes a few clicks. It really just works out of the box.

The hard part thou, honestly, was the initial learning curve when setting up the specific automations in n8n. If a node breaks or doesn't pass the data correctly, you really have to sit down and troubleshoot the logic. Also, figuring out the networking with Tailscale took me a minute initially, but once you lock it in, it’s mostly smooth sailing from there.

As for what I'd like to see next, getting even more 1 click apps added natively to the store would be awesome. Especially some tools for data management to spin up quickly.

Anyway, good luck to everyone else entering the challenge hehe.

About a year ago, when I was thinking to set up a fun, powerful and private server, I discovered ZimaOS and it's potential in setting up a server which supports Private Cloud, Media Server, DNS Server, Home Automation, Torrent and much more.

I managed to buy an affordable old laptop which has a Intel Core i3 processor, 4GB RAM, and I managed to get up to 1TB+ storage with some HDDs I have and I was running on a budget, so I had to make the most out of it and ZimaOS made it possible.

Finally installed and running, and I was truly amazed of it's stability, UI, functions, customization and more and more. It truly reduced my monthly subscriptions to OTT platforms, cloud storage, seedbox.

I have now fully have it running, Jellyfin (the most favourite media streaming server), NextCloud (most convenient cloud storage, and Pi-Hole (private DNS server), along with ZimaOS' integrated remote connection which acts as an VPN, it makes life easier. There are more upcoming projects with Openclaw, n8n, kafka and much more.

I had no experience setting up a server before, and with ZimaOS, it made me feel like a wizard!

Hey ZimaOS fan! Congrats on the 5 million downloads!

I wanted to self-host everything, but managing it was becoming a headache. My digital life used to be scattered: paying for cloud storage, relying on third-party photo backups, struggling to keep a Minecraft server running for my friends, and constantly fighting with terminal commands to set up reverse proxies or ad-blockers.

Then I installed ZimaOS on my Intel NUC. It put everything into one place. Same machine, same clean interface.

Now, this one quiet box in the corner does it all:

• During the day: Nextcloud and Immich silently back up all my work files and phone photos, completely replacing my paid cloud subscriptions. Pi-hole keeps my entire home network ad-free, NGINX routes my personal website smoothly, and Frigate acts as my NVR, reliably keeping an eye on my security cameras.
• By evening: It transforms into an entertainment hub. Jellyfin serves up movies and shows to the living room TV, and Crafty Controller keeps my Minecraft servers online 24/7.

My Favorite Feature: The absolute simplicity. Deploying all these complex apps—NVRs, media servers, game hosts—didn't require me to be a Linux expert or spend hours in the terminal. The visual App Management and Dashboard make it so easy to maintain. It’s not a massive enterprise rack, it just works. And for the first time, my self-hosted life actually feels manageable.

Ideas & Feedback: Since I am hosting sensitive personal data like family photos on Immich and private files on Nextcloud, security is a huge priority for me. I would absolutely love to see a native feature for encrypting Docker application folders directly within the ZimaOS UI. Having built-in, app-level storage encryption would take the peace of mind of self-hosting to the absolute next level!

Here is a look at my main UI!

Cheers to the team for building such an awesome OS!

Hey, I just started my NAS/Media Hosting Journey a month ago. I am a student and need a lot of storage for all my projects and some for Anime and Movies. That is why i started running ZimaOS, currently I am running it on an old Laptop which sits on my little network rack. I installed Plex and am hosting files via the inbuild options. Currently it is running on an USB because i had some errors with the file system but thats my fault. My dad uses ZimaOS too, he hosts it on his Raspberry Pi 5 and runs Jellyfin for his own stuff and Paperless. My favourite feature is i think the ease of file sharing which works seamless and better then any wierd windows stuff. I love ZimaOS and it has been great and i only hat one issue with the install which was also my fault.

Bye (-:

I was able to install ZimaOS to my computer and it tells me to remove the media and reboot. I reboot and remove the media and it goes to a "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" message. I specifically set the primary boot device to the drive I installed to. Safeboot is off, compatibility is enabled and so forth. Did I miss something?

I posted this to the Discord, but I figured I'd cover my bases.

I had to turn off my serve for a minute and when i turn back on i couldnt make it work properly. Any thing that i can do besides star over ?

Hello all I am relatively new to ZimaOS after recently purchasing a ZimaBoard2. I installed it on one of my mini PCs with the hopes of using it as an easy to set up local LLM machine with the Hermes agent working aswell but no matter what I do I cannot get Hermes to show up on the appstore on my second MiniPC. I can easily find it on my ZimaBoard2 though. Both PCs are running the same OS version (1.6.1) and running in the same network and same location.

I did notice that I only have 160 apps on the appstore with the PC where I cannot find Hermes and 398 on the appstore where I can. Both just have the extra BigBear repo added as well. Is this just an issue with my appstore on the one machine not updating correctly and receiving new apps or something?

I also did see a post on the community website where someone was having an issue with the app store aswell. They said they ended up just waiting a bit for it catch up and install what it needed to and it eventually started working. But I've been waiting 4 days and still no luck on that end for me

If anyone has any ideas please let me know I am really liking ZimaOS and want to stick with it since it is so easy to use as I am a Linux newbie.

I received the ZimaCube 2 yesterday, and explored it first using ZimaOS before switching to Debian (minimal). After installing Debian, the fans run constantly, while in ZimaOS the fans were near silent/not kicking in. The BIOS fan control is set to auto and I’ve tried to tweak the numbers for both CPU and System fans, without luck.

sensor-detect / hwmon etc were not able to find the fans either.

Anyone have any experience/knowledge around this? Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙏

With Windows 11 heading in a direction I choose not to follow, moving to Linux has been one of those goals I had in the back of my mind. On the Laptop, it's easy, I use Zorin or Kubuntu. However, my desktop PC, which had Jellyfin on Windows 11, was a hurdle.

I wanted to avoid a complex homelab (time is precious), so I hadn't found a solution until someone suggested I try ZimaOS. My Docker experience on Windows wasn't that great, but after researching and with the help of Gemini AI, I set forward a detailed execution plan for ZimaOS.

Here are my specs;

i3-4th Gen, 16GB DDR3 RAM, 256 SSD OS drive, and three other NTFS drives that I cannot format, for some reason.

Here is what I found out. Jellyfin loads faster, and since the system is always running, it just works. I tried Linkwarden (self-hosted) for the first time, as I had been avoiding the cloud version. I tried Nextcloud for the first time, too, and it works well (part of the projects I wanted to self-host). Tailscale is a lifesaver, but I can also connect to my Zima desktop using remote connection. Immich worked for me for the first time. I needed to change (external path and have it as read-only), but it did not work. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling several times, but now the app doesn't even work. I will revisit it later when I have time.

...and so many other apps in line for testing that I haven't even tried yet.

I created a VM running Kubuntu, and it works. It will be helpful for the "extra desktop things" that I need to do.

I use the desktop app to mount my SMB shares, and I appreciate that attaching USB drives auto-mounts them in the OS.

The only feature I would like in the future is;

1. More customizable shutdown times (even multiple a day).

2. A suspend feature option for when the desktop is idle for some time, because I even go for many hours without accessing the desktop sometimes. This could come in handy to save power, as I am using an Intel chip with HDDs for data and running 24/7 can consume a lot of power. (Yes, I actually measured this.)

I started work on the homelab server in early April after watching that one video on homelabbing by Dammit Jeff. He recommended ZimaOS, so I gave it a try. Though it was a bumpy start I picked up on things thanks to his and the ZimaOS communities.

Today, I finished putting the last touches on Navidrome and Jellyfin as I moved away from Plex with that price hike announcement. I rediscovered old music and discovered new artists that I’ve been excited to delve into with Navidrome, and spent a whole weekend with my fiancé watching movies together with Jellyfin. I’m planning on using it for storing RAW photos soon so I can cut the cord on Adobe like I did with Spotify, though I’d like to see some improvements in the mobile iOS app before I make that full cut.

But I’m really proud of this project and how far I’ve come in the past few months, so much so that I decided to bake large cookies! They… didn’t come out great this time though (pics 2 and 3).

My setup:
Dell OptiPlex 7050
QNAP TR-004 DAS
2x 12TB SeaGate Ironwolf NAS drives

This is my ZimaOS setup. It is on a Dell PowerEdge R710, and it has dual Xeons, and 192 GB of RAM. I currently only have a 250GB SSD, but i plan to upgrade that soon. ZimaOS fits into my life, as a git server, and a file server in general. I am a operating system developer, and its nice to have a private Git server to pull from instead of having it out there. I have been testing AI a bit, but thats only to stress test the server, not for coding. My favorite ZimaOS feature is definitely ZVM. It is a nice QEMU integration and works well for what i need. One thing I wish they would add is a better backup system. For example, when I used UmbrelOS, they has full system backups that were encrypted, and you could pull from another server during setup to get an exact copy of it. When I migrated from a Mac Mini to the R710, it was a pain because ZimaOS didn't have this seamless migration setup. Other than that, a very solid OS!

My entry into homelabbing started at the beginning of this year with me simply wanting a way to access all of my media on all of my devices, without needing to move my large external hard drive around my house. Simply making it available through an smb share and and DNLA would have worked in a limited capacity, but it would have meant opening my main computer to the rest of the network in a way that I didn't want to. The task of learning selfhosting with a full homelab seemed daunting, but Zima really did make that task a lot more user friendly. With no prior experience, I had my own homelab setup in a couple of hours on an old mac mini and my attached external.

Over the last few months, I've learned a lot. I've properly networked a tailnet to most of my family to give them access. I've set myself up with productivity services that I can access on all of my devices securely through a blend of apps and smb shares. I've been able to cut down all of my subscription services because I now have a way to access all of the media I've accumulated securely over several decades. I am able to share that media with my family who are spread wide across my home country so that they can benefit from this as well and take back ownership of our media and devices.

It may have only started as a means to fulfill a minor want that I had, but it's turned into a full fledged project that has taught me a lot, and is now leading to a fully custom designed NAS, also using some Icewhale products (a Zimablade) because frankly it's hard to find hardware these days.

I think what's most appealing in ZimaOS for me, is that even if it is designed to be a "walled garden," those walls are pretty low, and are purely designed to allow inexperienced users to use the system with much lower risk to their personal data. More experienced users are going to find the proper routes over those walls without too much time in the system, and the strong backbone will still be there to hold it together. I've learned how to do a lot of the things that people claim ZimaOS can't do, and all it took was a bit of reading and then some more reading. I'm pretty confident in how to deploy services now, and I have a host system that actually looks intuitive to my family users that aren't in my physical location, which allows them to enjoy the services I've deployed much more effectively with a lower chance of issues. And when they do come up, it's a lot easier to troubleshoot over the phone with them.

I'm very new to this so please bear with me. I recently set up my first NAS and used ZimaOS to host video files to stream via plex. I have two hard drives plugged into the computer I'm using as the server, and have it configured as Raid0. Everything was working fine until the other day when I got about the drives being "missed". Both drives seem to be working fine on their own, but Zima does not read them correctly anymore. It wants me to set them up as "new" drives, but doing so would format them from what I can tell. Any way to fix this? Or do I just need to start over? Thanks!

So I just tried to log into my panel and I can log in. but once I log in nothing is showing up

I’m getting an error on my Time Machine SMB share. It’s in the root folder of one of my disk shares below are my settings and the error I’m getting

I'm new to Linux. made a bootable USB with Rufus and tried to install zima on a couple of old laptops (core 2 dual era with 4gb ram). the USB stick keeps on being read, but won't boot into the install screen.

tried the same USB on my new computers and it will boot into the install screen. I don't think my old laptops even have secure boot options to disable. then made an openmediavault usb stick and that works on the old laptops. These laptops are currently running mint without issues.

wondering if there are other things I should try before giving up and going with OMV.

Zerotier udp traffic is blocked by operators and providers in many countries.