This reminds me of the famous HN Dropbox comment [0]. It was perfectly correct and yet so wrong at the same time. TrueNAS is probably for the people who want the power and flexibility with almost none of the hassle. Ironically, the people who have to deal with this professionally every day probably want to leave the work at work.
Having a playground/homelab at home is one thing, but playing with your family's data and access to it can get annoying really fast.
I think most people who don’t want to tinker would prefer a Synology or similar NAS solution.
The problem with TrueNAS is it fills the niche where it’s targeting people who want to tinker, but don’t want to learn how to tinker. Which is likely a smaller demographic than those who are willing to roll their own and those who just want a fully off-the-shelf experience.
I also think Synology would be closer to the Dropbox experience than TrueNAS.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to when I said "Hacker News Poster", and it's why I said that I know I'm the weird one. I'm not completely out of touch.
It's a little different though; TrueNAS still requires a fairly high level of technical competence to install on your own hardware; you still need to understand how to manage partitions and roughly what a Jail is and basic settings for Samba and the like. It's not completely analogous to Dropbox because Dropbox is trivial for pretty much anyone.
Having a playground/homelab at home is one thing, but playing with your family's data and access to it can get annoying really fast.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224