[gh02t]

Jail-based plugins were always half baked and brittle on Core back to when it was still called FreeNAS. Updates seemed to require complicated manual intervention every time and trying to do it through the UI was a death sentence. Scale is attempting to streamline it with container/Kubernetes-based plugins. It's got some rough edges and growing pains, but in my experience so far it has still been an improvement for me even if I liked the simplicity of jails more.

Proxmox is a better platform if you wanna run a fleet of custom VMs etc, but Scale is doing interesting things if your use case is more "plugin"-like. I use both.

[SpecialistK]

On Proxmox, as much as possible I would just spin up an Alpine or Debian LXC container and install whichever packages I need, so it is more manual than the Jail-based plugins, but not a huge inconvenience.

While typing that I remembered another annoyance I had with TrueNAS, which is that it doesn't let me pick truly custom MAC addresses for my Jails or VMs, which I like for DHCP reservations. I use Coca-Cola's prefix, because it's funny and I know immediately that it's one of my hosted services.

I recall a blog post or thread somewhere describing the issues TrueNAS devs had with Jail plugins, but can't immediately find it again. If I do, I'll link it.