HexOS Roadmap Update
November 26, 2025
By Jonathan Panozzo
It's hard to believe it's already been a year since we launched the HexOS Beta and the early access campaign. What a journey it's been! In today's blog post, we're going to provide a summary of this past year's accomplishments, a run-down of what's left to achieve our 1.0 release, what's coming next, an update on the AnyRaid project, and our HexOS Holiday Sale!
A Year in Review
Since launching the beta, our team has been hard at work transforming HexOS into the powerful, user-friendly platform you see today. Over the past twelve months, we've delivered substantial improvements across the board.
In the early months following launch, we focused on strengthening the foundation. We expanded our team and focused on building fundamental backend systems for our platform to support our long-term goals. We enhanced the setup wizard with improved functionality and existing data detection and implemented additional confirmations for destructive actions to protect user data.
By mid-year, we introduced manual pool configuration, a game-changer that gave users granular control over drive participation and storage layouts. This update also brought the Activity Center, providing a centralized hub for system notifications and event tracking. We continued refining the platform with networking fixes, performance improvements, and folder loading optimizations that made everyday interactions faster and more reliable.
The fall marked a major milestone with the introduction of our app curation system. This opened the door for users to create, customize, and share install scripts for any application they wanted to see on HexOS. We then expanded our team again to put dedicated focus towards growing our app library, which has grown our curations beyond Immich and Plex. We’ve quickly added Jellyfin, Home Assistant, qBittorrent, and more recently Sonarr, Radarr, and Prowlarr. We also rolled out the Folder Wizard, extending simple folder creation with encryption support, quota management, and Time Machine backup capabilities.
Throughout the year, we launched our comprehensive documentation site, bringing together getting-started guides, feature documentation, troubleshooting resources, and release notes in one centralized location. We improved the First Flight onboarding experience with progress tracking and persistent guidance banners, making HexOS more approachable for newcomers to home server management.
Behind the scenes, we invested heavily in infrastructure improvements. We deployed an end-to-end testing suite that dramatically improved our development workflow and code quality. We added support for TrueNAS SCALE Fangtooth (25.04), implemented enhanced user management capabilities, and refined countless smaller details, from install script improvements to upgrade timeout handling for older hardware. The response from our community has been incredible, and your feedback has been instrumental in shaping the direction of HexOS. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.
The Road to 1.0: What's Left
We're excited to share that HexOS is approaching a major milestone. There are four primary components left for us to reach a 1.0 stable release:
1. Apps Interface Refinements
Our Apps interface is getting a significant upgrade coming this December. This update will feature:
- Proper category organization to help you find what you need faster
- Full search functionality
- Massive performance improvements
- Enhanced UI/UX polish throughout
- An expanded library of curated applications
- We're confident this update will make discovering and managing your apps more intuitive than ever. And here’s a sneak peak:
We're confident this update will make discovering and managing your apps more intuitive than ever. And here’s a sneak peak:
2. TrueNAS SCALE 25.10 (Goldeye) Support
TrueNAS SCALE 25.10 was released in October, and we're preparing to bring full support to HexOS. Following the 25.10.1 release slated for December, we will be adding official support to HexOS. Going forward, we'll be following this same cadence: HexOS support for SCALE releases will typically be available following the .1 patch of a major release. This approach ensures maximum stability for our users and gives us the time we need to address any API changes.
3. UI Polish and Bug Fixes
While HexOS is already highly functional, we're committed to delivering a polished, refined experience. Our team is currently working through the remaining minor bugs and applying additional polish throughout the interface. These seemingly small improvements add up to create a significantly better user experience.
4. HexOS Local
The most significant feature we promised to deliver before marking the product as 1.0 is a locally running UI/UX. This has been a top priority for our team, and we're excited about the progress we've made. HexOS Local represents a fundamental shift in how you'll be able to interact with your system, providing greater control and flexibility. In case you missed it, we recently published a blog: all about HexOS Local.
Beyond 1.0: Buddy Backups and Virtual Machines
We know many of you are eager to hear about features like Buddy Backups and Virtual Machine support. Both of these features are slated for release in 2026 in the following order:
HexOS 1.1: Buddy Backups
Following the 1.0 release, we will be immediately shifting focus to Buddy Backup as the next major feature to be delivered. We're excited to share that we've actually expanded the scope of this project. Buddy Backups will now include peer-to-peer networking as an integrated component of the solution, rather than relying on third-party applications to achieve that goal. We really want the entire experience to be as seamless as possible, and this expanded approach will deliver exactly that.
HexOS 1.2: Virtual Machines
Virtual Machines (VMs) are a powerful way to run complete operating systems on your HexOS server in isolated environments, similar to how containers work but with full OS-level virtualization. This allows you to run Windows, Linux, or other operating systems alongside HexOS, each with dedicated resources and complete independence from one another. While traditional VMs are typically used in a headless capacity with remote graphical display (accessing the desktop over the network), HexOS VMs will take this a step further. We're building support for direct hardware passthrough, allowing you to assign graphics cards and USB devices directly to a VM. This means your HexOS server can double as a physical desktop PC. Imagine booting into a Windows VM with full GPU acceleration for gaming or creative work, all while your server continues to handle storage, apps, and other tasks in the background.
VMs were delayed last year due to significant changes within TrueNAS SCALE that made ongoing development challenging. However, the platform has since stabilized, and we're eager to get back to work on this feature following the Buddy Backup release. When VMs arrive in HexOS, they'll include curations similar to Apps, allowing you to take advantage of pre-configured templates for common use cases, greatly reducing the technical burden from our users.
AnyRaid Project Update
One of the most exciting developments this year has been our sponsorship of the ZFS AnyRaid project. Introducing ZFS AnyRaid. Traditional ZFS has a significant limitation when it comes to mixing drives of different sizes in a pool: the system can only utilize capacity equal to the smallest drive in each vdev, leaving larger drives severely underutilized. For example, if you have a vdev with three 4TB drives and one 8TB drive, traditional ZFS would only use 4TB from each drive, wasting 4TB of the 8TB drive's capacity. AnyRaid solves this problem by intelligently distributing data across drives of varying sizes, dramatically reducing wasted space and giving HexOS users the flexibility to upgrade their storage incrementally without sacrificing capacity—all while maintaining the data protection benefits of ZFS.
This year marked significant progress on the ZFS AnyRaid project, sponsored by Eshtek and developed by the talented team at Klara, Inc. The team designed an innovative adaptable tile architecture that enables data layout changes in ZFS—a groundbreaking capability that addresses one of the long-standing limitations of ZFS storage. They successfully implemented the new AnyRAID vdev type along with a tile allocation algorithm that maximizes available space. Throughout the year, they added support for critical ZFS functions including checkpoint, sequential resilver, mirror parity, and RAID-Z parity. The team presented their technical achievements at the OpenZFS Developer Summit, and they're currently implementing data rebalance functionality to allow efficient online data movement. This work represents a major step forward for the ZFS ecosystem and will ultimately benefit all HexOS users.
When Will 1.0 Release?
We committed to our community that we wouldn't release 1.0 until the Local UI was available. That project has grown in both scope and capability, evolving into something even better than we originally envisioned. It is for this reason that we are shifting the release date of 1.0 to Q1 of 2026 (by March 31, 2026).
This additional time will give us the opportunity to properly finish our development work and complete the beta testing required for us to feel comfortable with a stable release.
HexOS Holiday Sale
To celebrate the holidays and thank our community, we're excited to announce our HexOS Holiday Sale, starting today! Existing customers can purchase additional licenses for just $99 each, perfect for expanding your home server setup. New customers can take advantage of our special two-pack bundle for $298, with additional licenses available at the same $99 promotional price. Single licenses remain available at $199 until our 1.0 release in Q1 2026. This holiday pricing for additional licenses and the two-pack bundle is available through December 31st, so don't miss out on this opportunity to join or expand your HexOS experience.
Please note: License transfers are not permitted. All licenses are tied to the purchasing account.
Thank You
We're incredibly grateful for the support of our early access community. Your feedback, bug reports, and feature suggestions have been invaluable in shaping HexOS into what it is today. We're more excited than ever about the future of this platform, and we can't wait to share what's coming next.
Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, please reach out to us with questions or feedback.