Longtime linux user/admin here.
I’ve installed the Leap 15.6 release in a testbed. It’s a very nice UI, what I’m trying to do/understand is what the benefit of using this over a normal Linux/Samba install is. NAS have been touted to me by a number of people, but no one has been able to really articulate the benefits, so I figured I’d ask here.
FYI, I have looked at other NAS, but this one has the nicest UI
@linuxgurugamer welcome to the Rockstor community.
There are probably very differing opinions whether there is any benefit (or not). In general, you could do all of these things on a vanilla Leap install. However, I would say to major differentiations:
since Rockstor (and most other NAS implementations I venture to say) are intended to be more of an appliance (so very purposeful like an embedded device almost, that does one thing well) compared to a normal Linux/Samba installation, the focus is on reducing the exposed functions to the NAS specific ones.
Usually, the OS and data is separated, so a reinstall can be done in minutes. Like others, the linux footprint itself is reduced to a JeOS type approach, as to only have what’s really needed (which of course you can with any distro yourself). In the end most of these NAS distros still rely on upstream for functionality (Rockstor attempts to not deviate from upstream standard to take advantage of the OpenSUSE provided updates and changes.
So, as a longtime linux user/admin there might be less benefit for you, as you probably can configure all of the functionality needed (btrfs RAID, NFS, SAMBA, docker, etc.) without much trouble and the main selling point would be that there is a unified UI focused on NAS functionality only …
As you might have seen, you can install Rockstor on top of your vanilla OpenSUSE installation - which drives home the point that (at least this one) NAS distis are a “curated” view of a Linux distribution.
My 2 cents, I’m sure there are other viewpoints.