HexOS Q1 Status Update

Hard to believe it’s already March of 2025. It seems like only yesterday we were just launching our Black Friday sale. I guess time flies when you’re having fun, and we’re having an absolute blast building HexOS! In today’s blog post, we want to give you guys an update on all that has transpired since the launch, and an updated look into the roadmap.

From Launch to Now

We launched the early access sale and the HexOS Beta on Thanksgiving, with the sale ending the following Monday. In the course of those 5 days, we sold over 25,000 lifetime licenses, achieving 5x over expectations. On behalf of the entire Eshtek team to those that have purchased, we greatly thank you for your support.

Thanks to the success of our launch, we needed to reprioritize some projects and tasks. Building an expanded dev/test environment, improving our remote-work infrastructure, reorganizing code and repositories, deploying new IT systems, and hiring additional talent became top priorities. We also kept scaling our hosted infrastructure for our forums, ecommerce, and the Command Deck.

And we’re pleased to report that since our launch, we’ve completed ALL of the above-mentioned priority objectives. We deployed new server virtualization environments for us to easily spin up instances of HexOS for ourselves, trusted testers, and developers/partners. We’ve improved our network infrastructure to increase our local performance, security, and reliability. Our code and repos are now far more organized and ready for contributions from our growing team of developers. We’ve deployed Intercom to help manage customer service and simplify operations. We also purchased and built new test systems with a variety of hardware.

When it came to recruitment and hiring, we had a few people earmarked for positions prior to the launch and thanks to our success, we were able to bring them all on board at the beginning of January. Furthermore, we spent a good chunk of time at the beginning of this year reviewing CVs and conducting interviews for additional developer positions. We whittled down over 150 applicants down to four technical evaluations. At the completion of those evaluations just recently, we hired two and we couldn’t be happier with our choices. We are actively working on a new page for the site to introduce you to our growing team.

In addition, we also pushed a few minor quality-of-life improvements to the platform including the ability to manually discover your server in the setup wizard by WAN IP address (useful for scenarios where you’re not on the same LAN as the server you wish to configure).

All in all, we are incredibly thrilled at how quickly we were able to adapt to our overwhelming success, and at the pace we’re moving now, we see nothing standing in our way of getting to 1.0.

TL;DR: The early access sale was so successful that we had to take a minute to expand our tech, processes, and team MUCH sooner than expected. We are very excited to be bringing HexOS to you faster and with more features than we ever thought possible!

Coming in Q2

With our first wave of hiring and planning now complete, the team has been back focused entirely at grinding out some pretty major improvements to HexOS and the Command Deck. Here are some specific features we intend to deliver in the next update for HexOS.

Customizable Location Preferences

When users add applications to their HexOS server, various folders need to be created for the purpose of storing various data related to those applications. Applications tend to need a place to store their configuration, logging, and sometimes additional places (e.g. a place to perform media transcoding such as with Plex). In some instances, multiple applications will need access to a single folder. HexOS simplifies application deployments for users by automatically creating the necessary folders as applications are installed. In the next update we have planned, we intend to make all of these locations fully customizable, for users that may have special requirements or simply wish to override our default values.

And as always, all of our implementations are designed to work seamlessly between desktop and mobile platforms.

New Activity Center

We are also overhauling how we’re handling activity and dashboard notifications in this new update. We realized having a giant Health card didn’t make a lot of sense. Instead, we have changed it to the Activity card which allows us to filter pertinent messages for the user regarding server health, updates, and other notifications.

Notifications that you dismiss will enter the Archive, which you can visit at any time to see a log of all activities on your system.

User Settings & Preferences Improvements

Similar to how our forums work, preferences such as light/dark mode and language selection will now be stored as a part of your profile, allowing these preferences to automatically apply whenever you login from any device. You’ll also be able to disable the display of certain apps from the dashboard (for privacy or other reasons).

Manual Pool Configuration

Whether during the initial setup or when adding a new pool to your system, we want to give users the ability to further customize their pool layouts. This feature is also a precursor for us to support the adoption of existing TrueNAS SCALE systems that wish to migrate to HexOS without losing their data.

This feature will affect both the initial setup wizard as well as New Pool creation under the Storage page. Note: removing drives from an already configured pool is not supported.

Stability Improvements

In addition to all these major features, we are also prioritizing bug fixes and stability improvements.

These updates will be coming in Q2 to HexOS. Stay tuned to the forums for an announcement!

Other Roadmap Updates

While the previously mentioned features are already far into development, we also have an updated priorities list that we want to share.

Rescheduling VM Support

Similar to what happened with Docker, iXsystems is in the process of migrating TrueNAS SCALE to a new VM and Linux Container management environment in their next major release, 25.04. Incus promises to provide a few key feature improvements, including a better web-based VNC agent. As such, focusing on VM management features in the short term didn’t make sense given that the ground would be moving beneath our feet. Furthermore, in temperature checking our current community, it appears that increasing application support and buddy backups are of a higher desire. It is for these reasons we have lower the priority of VM features. Keep in mind, you can still create VMs within TrueNAS itself, and we will give you start/stop controls from our Command Deck dashboard for them.

Coming Q3: App Curation Templates

While Plex and Immich are great, if it wasn’t obvious enough already, we have plenty of other applications we want to see curated over time. To accelerate that process, we are announcing our plans to build an App Curation Templating System! This system will provide a way for others to curate apps for use within HexOS! This could be app developers themselves or community contributors that just want to see their favorite home server app get curated a little faster. We’ll have more to say about this initiative in the near future, so stay tuned!

Coming Q3: New Folder Features

Building upon our simple folder creation interface, a new wizard-driven process will allow for specialized use cases such as encrypted folders and backups (e.g. Time Machine). This feature is a prerequisite that is needed before we can begin work on Snapshots, Replication, and Buddy Backup.

We are still planning on a 1.0 release this year, and we will keep you all up to date as development progresses and if any of these priorities change.