Fygo OS Tested – The Simplest DIY NAS Operating System??

As someone who is currently using both UNRAID and TrueNAS, when I was offered a key for the simplest DIY NAS operating system, I must say I was intrigued. This is Fygo OS, an open source and optionally paid NAS OS that’s incredibly reminiscent of pre-built NAS systems, with the flexibility and control that full DIY OSes like TrueNAS or UNRAID can provide. I’ve got it installed on the ZimaBoard 2, and it’s incredibly impressive. Let’s take a look and see what you get for your optional money.

Let’s start with that part, the license. They have three options, Free, Plus and Lifetime. Free is obvious. Plus is $49 a year (although set up as a one time payment rather than a subscription) and Lifetime is $199 as a one time payment for a lifetime. The only differences between the free and paid options are the apps from the built in app store, updates, a 3 user limit and 4 storage devices. We’ll come back to the app store later, for now let’s move on to the headline features. The aim with Fygo OS is to couple the power of a custom NAS with the effortlessness of a pre-built. Fygo runs on x86 and ARM, and importantly offers ZFS, Btrfs and ext4 on the storage front. They have super simple SMB share settings – easier than any system I’ve used – simple remote access, team collaboration and file sharing. That sounds great, so let’s dive in. 

Installation is super simple, just use a tool like Rufus to burn the ISO to a USB stick, boot it on your system, and with a couple of clicks it’ll give you an IP address to visit and that’ll do it. Once you’re in, the UI will look mighty familiar if you’ve ever used a Synology or QNAP NAS – a full desktop UI with windows, an app store, and file browser. This is a pretty big step up in terms of user experience compared to the likes of UNRAID, and especially TrueNAS. Setting up a storage pool takes a handful of clicks and that’s it. You get the option to pick the file system, with ext4 being the default, although Btrfs and ZFS are definitely better options, with ZFS being my preference. Then you pick the drives, pick what storage mode you want to use – for two drives RAIDZ1 is your best bet – and that’s pretty much it. It’ll wipe any data on the drives, then that’s your NAS ready to go. Creating a folder in the file browser automatically makes it an SMB share with all the right permissions, so all you need to do is connect from your PC and away you go. This is the easiest NAS experience I’ve had – it’s even easier than most pre-built units. It’s crazy simple. This also supports SSD caching, although it’s worth noting the free version only gives you access to four storage drives, although that doesn’t include SSDs for caching nor hot spares.

The app store on the other hand is a little limited. Their main website suggests there are 200+ apps, but at least on my installation there are only ten “official” and 15 community apps – although it’s worth noting that the ability to run VMs is in the app store, which means the free version doesn’t get access to VMs. That also means the Fygo TV and Fygo Photos apps are for paying customers only. Speaking of Fygo TV, initially I thought this was a way for your NAS to act as a smart TV type thing, but it turns out it’s a Plex clone. You add a media library, it scans the metadata, downloads subtitles, all that jazz. They say you can watch from any device, including your TV, but there doesn’t appear to be a Fygo app for TVs yet, although there is an Android app at least. At least when accessing the app through a web browser it works pretty well, it’s remarkably responsive and smooth. The fact it isn’t as ubiquitous as Plex or Jellyfin (of which the latter is available through the app store anyway) makes it a lot less useful than I’d like, but still it’s there if you want it.

The big catch with the “App Store” though is the other “System App” a couple places down – Docker. All of these app stores – QNAP, Asustor, Synology, UGREEN – they are all just Docker in disguise with varying levels of pre-setup done for you so apps are as close to a “one click install” as possible. So if you’re willing to put a little bit of effort in, even on the free tier you absolutely can have Plex, or Jellyfin, or qBittorrent (for all your Linux ISO needs…), or anything else you want running on here. If there’s a Docker container available, you can run it here. And it’s still fairly simple to set up. To test it out, I set up Jellyfin through the Docker app, and besides adding the mount points for the film and TV libraries I copied over (to test Fygo TV), that was incredibly simple too. It started, I ran through the setup, and hey-presto it was up and running. It decided to scan the TV library first, but even still it managed to start playing a film immediately. I can skip through the media, and amazingly it managed to pull subtitles in seconds. All of that in under a minute of setup. Amazing.

It’s worth noting that Fygo OS – and Fygo as a brand in general – are really new. Like, during the process of writing this video, their Fygo TV app seems to have launched on the various app marketplaces, and the OS appears to have had exactly ONE update since launch. We’re on version 1.2 effectively, and the Fygo TV app is on 0.9. The lack of apps in their app store isn’t much of a surprise, and neither is the limited nature of the feature roll out. It’s also worth noting that they claim to be open source, but their “Source Code” page lists their repos are “Planned”. As far as I’m aware, this is effectively a Linux distro – Rufus created a SysLinux boot record and there are a whole bunch of .deb packages, so I’d guess this is a Debian distro with a few niceties. Oh, and one other thing to note is the prices I mentioned – the $199 in particular for the Lifetime package appears to be discounted, down from $299, with what I have to assume is an introductory discount. While either of those prices do put it in the same ballpark as UNRAID’s updated pricing ($249 for Lifetime), there is a fairly clear difference between the two, especially in terms of maturity. UNRAID has been around for two decades, while Fygo OS is literally brand new, with some of the main advertised features still being rolled out. It’s hard to trust an OS that is this new, especially for your server.

With that said, the level of refinement and polish on what is available is absolutely incredible. The ease in which you can set this up and use it is incredible, and even on the free tier you’ll absolutely be able to get this up and running in an afternoon without having to do much learning. If you can set up a QNAP NAS, you absolutely can set this up – but at least here it’s on your hardware, and has better features including ZFS and direct Docker access. Personally I think I’d need to let Fygo work on this a little more before I’d consider using it, and while the UI is very slick, there are a lot of settings that are obfuscated and a lot of features I’d consider essential like Wireguard or Tailscale VPNs appear to be missing. Plus it’s hard to trust an OS from a brand new company, especially for a server, especially one that says it’s open source, but is still in the “planning” stages of making their repos public. For sure, Fygo OS is unique, but I think it sits in the ‘one to watch’ camp, rather than the ‘go-to’ camp. I’ll stick with TrueNAS for my personal machines, and UNRAID for my production server.