CasaOS to ZimaOS migration - thoughts?
Has anyone migrated from CasaOS to ZimaOS?
Is it worth the migration? It seems like a lot of work, and maybe going in a more commercialized direction that I don't like.
Curious what other people's thoughts/experiences are.
13 replies
I haven't looked. Not long ago, I decided to just ditch Casa entirely. Moving all my containers out and rebuilding them took me a week or so. There were some apps that I missed something or other on and had to start fresh with. Luckily nothing too critical.
Between Homarr, Dashdot, and Dockhand, I don't feel like I'm missing anything.
Casa hits a great niche for me - I do most of my management on-the-go from my phone. It hits the perfect balance of convenience.
I moved from CasaOS to... debian. Once you have the tools in place (e.g. Portainer for docker control, Gethomepage for status, termux on your phone for ssh...) CasaOS has no added value. On the contrary I find it pollutes my docker-compose files.
You run terminal commands from your phone?
How's portainer's mobile UI? I haven't tried it.
All the time. Actually that's my main interacting with the server.
Portainer mobile UI is shit/non-existent: it's as the desktop site, you need a lot of zoom in and out, but I actually rarely use it. It's useful in the beginning to check containers' status, IP and port distribution and such.
I use Casa for actual mobile management - installing new apps, looking at logs, reconfiguring things on the go, etc. It's pretty rare I sit down and use my computer. Sounds like portainer isn't quite what I need.
I can't imagine running terminal commands off my phone! Sounds frustrating. I can barely type on my phone without autocomplete lol, let alone with arcane symbols. Hacker keyboard only helps somewhat. I occasionally ssh into my server from my phone, but it's a last resort.
I don't use autocomplete or autocorrect so for me it's keyboard as usual in the terminal. Actually I use unexpected keyboard, it runs very well with ctrl, tab etc. Not so nice for writing a lot and fast though. But that's okay, that's not my style anyway.
I feel that I have a better control over my stack since my new setup (debian). Anyway casaos is very limited in the end, I can't control anything outside docker from it e.g. nginx, certbot, cronjobs, files, search... But it sure was a very good introduction to self-hosting! That's actually how I got started with docker.
I don't see any benefit.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
[Thread #325 for this comm, first seen 1st Jun 2026, 20:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I've run CassaOS briefly just to test it out. I've never run ZimaOS tho. ZimaOS looks like they have a larger app store for addons. It doesn't seem like 'a lot of work', especially utilizing CTOZ, but 'a lot of work' is subjective I guess.
https://www.zimaspace.com/docs/zimaos/casaos-to-zimaos-migration
They're pretty much the same thing except zima can be installed as an image where casa has to be manually layered on top of Debian using a curl command.
The parts I'm worried about are here: https://www.zimaspace.com/docs/zimaos/casaos-to-zimaos-migration#Other-System-Configurations-and-Data-to-Check
Specifically, system-level configs includes storage mounts (I have my NAS mounted onto my app server for storage and that was hell to get working) and non-Casa docker containers (I have a couple).
I was using CasaOS. Moved to ZimaOS. It's great!
One caveat... You need a dedicated PC. I'm bought a 2nd hand Optiplex i3 6100 with 12Gb RAM. Works great for my purposes.
I didn't migrate. Reinstalled everything. Not that had a lot. Mainly Immich. Which you can just copy over.