FYI I haven’t used cosmos. This post was the first I’ve heard of it, but I’ll likely try to migrate to it at some point.

There must be a term for middle-ground people like me. I’ve used computers my whole life, as a kid I portfowarded to host WC3 servers, as a teenager I self-hosted minecraft servers both on my pc and rented linux servers. I’m a software developer and I’ve dabbled in dozens of technologies and have a decent understanding of so many computer/IT related things that most people don’t even know exists.

I’m trying to say I think I’m a tech wizard but putting me in the “less tech savvy” bucket with my mom feels weird. Self hosting was a nightmare to get setup. There’s just too much shit to learn and when all you want is a Sonarr/radarr/jellyfin setup you’re just figure out the important details and get the damn thing working before you forget it all.

I like having all the customization available to me but I only want to learn details that are relevant to what I’m trying to do. It’s like game developers using Unity instead of writing their own physics engine. Yeah sure I could study real hard and painstakingly implement my own engine but it’s going to take fucking forever and there will be ever-present hidden issues plaguing me as I make the part of the game I actually care about.

The main disadvantage is it will be very hard to debug and fix when something breaks

This has been my experience self-hosting the normal way though lol. Yeah I’ve learned a bit but it’s not really an area of expertise I’m super keen on expanding. Getting my self-hosted server up was a bloody nightmare. Sharing drives, hardware pass-through with proxmox, containers, samba, mounting drives. There’s an endless list of services and configurations that I fucked around with until I got it working, never 100% sure which changes were actually necessary. If an issue comes up I have to relearn the 90% I’ve forgotten and try and remember wtf I did to get it working in the first place.

All of this is the experience of someone who is more computer literate than 90%+ of the population.

Even learning docker-compose is a task in itself because you need to become accustomed to linux text editors and the linux file structure (which btw is still a complete fucking black box to me).

The need for an app like Cosmos is obvious. There are a million ways to fuck up your home server trying to do it yourself and most of the time you’re just following tutorials made by other people. Why not just have an app that follows those tutorials for you and guarantees it’s done correct and securely?