I dunno why but I’m worried that casaos is holding me back from doing greater things I guess? I’m pretty new to self hosting and I discovered casaos from a Minecraft server setup tutorial of all things and it’s been great for me so far and does pretty much everything I need it to do, but I feel like I don’t really have a full understanding of what I can do outside of it, and I don’t really hear many people talk about casaos so I’m like worried it’s just not very good I guess? I’m just looking for ways to improve really.
For reference I just use my server for Minecraft on the occasion, a self hosted obsidian live sync, adguard, and in the future plan on hosting nextcloud. Casaos seems great for that and maybe it’s perfectly fine but I’d just be interested in being more knowledgeable I guess, and aware of any ways to improve.
Having a solution that works for you is never a bad thing.
Now it comes down to what you want to archive: Do you want something that just works? Great, you’re done - now go on and do some other things that you like, that’s perfectly fine. Or do you want to learn more about servers, virtualization, linux, networking and selfhosting in general? Then there are a million ways to get started.
I’d suggest to setup a little lab, if you haven’t already. Install Proxmox on your server and run CasaOS inside a virtual machine. Now you’ve learned about hypervisors and virtual machines. Afterwards you could create a second virtual machine to play around - maybe install debian and get used to the linux cli. Install docker manually, run some apps using docker-compose. Now you’re already doing some stuff that CasaOS does under the hood.
The possibilities are endless, the rabbit hole is deep. It can be a lot of fun, but don’t force youself to go down there if you don’t want to.
I second this - virtualization is the easiest way to branch out and try new things. You can keep the working system you already have, and also experiment with other systems.
A further advantage is that you can run services in separate VMs, which helps if you need isolated contexts for security, privacy, or stability reasons. And, if you break something while you’re learning you can just delete that VM and start over without affecting your other working services.