CasaOS

It's quite simple without any extensive possibility to configure the environment. It works quite well, but I have used it just shortly so far.

Really cool and slick design and easy to use and understand if you already know a bit of both docker and linux. Also it's not a full distro, but that's an upside in my opinion.

However there's barely any documentation.

True or not, you know how NFS is thought as the network file protocol of Linux? AFP for Macs, SMB for Windows... Only SMB is compatible out of the box everywhere. NFS is not even installed on Linux. If you want to share files between Linex-or-X and X, first let it not be member of Active Directory, 'cause you find an admin to join, or you'd need to set up SMB shares I don't even know how it's done.

This is where I think this would be hte most useful, it has a web file manager that it's faster and simpler than DSM or Nextcloud's. Which also replicates macOS' AirDrop but using a browser on each side, nothing to install, no iCloud account to log in into. It could potentially be done over the Internet too, I haven't tried that though.

But I think that would be about it. As a container manager, it needs work. In the effort to make it easier, they removed a lot of stuff options from the would be docker run command, e.g; it recognizes configured macvlans and even lets you choose them but offers no field to set a needed address and continues to display the ports field which conflicts with macvlan.

There's a Web UI field, but it's not mentioned if it reverse proxies for you, or if it's just the pointer for when you click on the dashboard icon. It's worked inconsistently so far.

Importing containers only broke them. The catalog, or "store" isn't that featured as say, Unraid's, and I'm not too crazy about all the background comms to China. I have no business there, why is it trying to communicate there? It's stopped on the firewall, but still. Not cool. It might be worth reading their privacy thing if it's gonna be online. Just keep in mind "protecting your data" is not the same as not collecting your data (where they'd have no data in need of protection).

That said, if you can deploy/maintain your containers in the CLI and all in macvlans so the host itself isn't allowed to connect to the Internet, it's a nice little dashboard that doubles as a file manager and has real system stats. It's far beyond what Heimdall and similar projects can do. Also maybe monitor the traffic from the dashboard itself.

Feels like it would be worth installing if I ever go back on Linux

I like it, very simple to install in my debian homelabs. And friendly to installing docker containers other than presented in it's Appstore.

It's not a distro as shown, just a web interface server that hosts dockers. Still amazing and decent for beginners.