I had an thought last night. I'm not really a front-end guy but I'm kind of curious what it would take to be a decent competitor to something like Umbrel or Start 9. Also wondering what would set another product like that apart from Start 9, umbrel, or yunohost.
Discussion
Good question.
Like I can think of some dorky options that I would like to see things like I2P support for all the things or better options besides TOR for accessing your device outside of your network.
But if I'm trying to make something that's focused on non-technical users, then something like that wouldn't necessarily be that appealing at least at first. UI would be key.
It’s something I’d lean on the bitcoin design community for.
System design would be key too. Easy setup/maint, verifiability, mobile management… lots of fun
yeah I'm not sure what the other systems use but I know Umbral leans pretty heavily on Docker and I definitely would like to ditch Docker for something a little bit simpler
Absofuckinglutely.
Fuck docker
What about guides for Win/Linux?
Web articles with lots of screenshots or video playlists.
The ones out there are old or they’re completely scattered
Guides for what specificly? I'm not opposed to writing guides and I've written several in the past. I just would need to know what to focus on.
Layer 1 but give focus to Layer 2s
Design wise, they lack a feature that keeps me from using those products vs doing things myself... The ability to link services to external dependencies. Example, I install a Start9, and go to install a lightning node, but it needs to install Bitcoin core, even though I have 2 core nodes already running on my network, and don't need a 3rd one.
Oh, interesting. I didn't know that was a problem. That's deff more of a power user kind of feature, but I get that the lack of flexibility would be frustrating.
If you knew your RPC user and password, something like that could be automated at setup.
It's definitely a power user feature, and it's a bit more complicated depending on what you're installing, it might need more external configuration for it to work beyond the rpc credentials.
But... Power users are a powerful target audience who may be more inclined to contribute back, if they're enabled to use these products more easily.
What I think would make it stand apart is being able to create a high availability cluster geographically separated... like having nodes running at trusted family or friends homes. That way if your internet or hardware fails you have two more running and have a few days to fix the node that is down. I'm sure no one's done this yet because it's not easy.