Umbrel makes it so easy. You just have to not be retarted.
Discussion
Absolutely! It's crazy that normies can't do this.
Go to your local computer store.
Buy a Raspberry Pi.
Buy an SDcard.
Download a file.
Flash it onto the SDcard.
Realize you don't have a card slot.
Back to the computer store.
Buy a USB adapter.
Flash the file.
Boot Umbrel.
Download 1TB of data.
5 days later setup Lightning.
Open your first channel.
Install Zeus on your phone.
Struggle with connecting to your node.
Compmain that TOR is slow.
Finally make your first Lightning payment.
It is 2025 and this is hard?
Small update as my first node on RPi4 +1TB was dying. I had to sync it back from zero and now it is 2nd month with several crashes and pruned node around 90% synced. This is no time for RPi anymore. Do not go for it.
Use 10year old laptop with i5 gen 4+ 16GB RAM and 2TB SDD and sleep well.
Old laptop or mini PC is the way to go.
Old laptop also gives you a screen, keyboard and battery (UPS) which is cool.
Sure. Replace go to the computer store and buy a Raspberry Pi with visit eBay or Amazon or FB marketplace or whatever and search for a used laptop or Intel NUC. It's still a pain in the ass. If it wasn't, the whole world would be running them.
What's a pain in the ass is when I fire up a system designed to be user friendly and I spend the next forever wondering why on earth they made the configuration decisions they did, and try to figure out where they've hidden this configuration away from me to protect me from myself.
No thanks, just gimme the tarballs.
I went overkill for my node bwecause i run alot of things on Start9
Desktop Gaming PC
32GB RAM, 2TB NVME, Ryzen 5000
I have been explicitly avoiding anything with a battery as I see no reason just to kill it for the sake of doing so.
Maybe I should learn more about power consumption, and maybe things are just a lot better now than they used to be, but running a laptop plugged in 24/7 turned the one I had in college into a pretty useless machine in only a few years.
While I 100% agree, since that's what my node runs on, and I too was an original Raspberry Pi and Umbrel user for 3.5 years before upgrading to an old laptop over 2 years ago, I still feel that the steps here are basically the same.
Yep. Someone needs to build from scratch while people are expecting computers with all software preinstalled and running. User friendly UI. This is showstopper.
How much is this the Pi and how much is you running more things on the SD card than is optimal? Been meaning to move my ~/.lnd over to /mnt/ anyway...
Or just buy a box from Umbral, plug and play.