Put plain Ubuntu on my UGREEN NAS instead of the vendor OS — SparkBox now uses 44% less RAM
Posted by tomspark
Fun one I have to share. My NAS is a UGREEN box that ships locked to their own OS (UGOS). I put plain Ubuntu on it instead — kept UGOS untouched as a fallback — and moved my entire SparkBox setup across. Same apps, same photos, nothing lost. The payoff surprised even me. Identical 14 apps running, measured at the same uptime: - UGOS: 3.5 GB RAM used - Ubuntu: 2.0 GB RAM used That's ~44% less memory, just from dropping all the background services the vendor OS runs that you never asked for. Lower CPU and ~70 fewer processes too. The real takeaway: SparkBox isn't chained to whatever OS your NAS shipped with. You own the hardware — you can run a clean, lean base under it. 🔥🔥 Full write-up + a script that handles the tricky bits is coming (there were a couple of genuinely weird UGREEN quirks to solve — that's a story for the guide). Anyone else running SparkBox on bare Ubuntu/Debian instead of a vendor NAS OS? What hardware are you on?