MinIO is Dead. Garage S3 is Better Anyway (Homelab Migration Guide)
Photo by todd kent on Unsplash
MinIO Community Edition is dead. On December 3, 2025, MinIO Inc. announced maintenance mode: no new features, no PR reviews, no Docker images, no RPM/DEB packages. Critical security fixes only "on a case-by-case basis."
This didn't come out of nowhere. Back in May 2025, they gutted the console - the GUI that made MinIO actually usable. What's left is a glorified file browser. User management, policies, replication config? Moved to the paid AIStor product. The whole thing is open source cosplay now - the repo exists, but it's just a funnel to their commercial offering.
The r/selfhosted and Hacker News threads are worth reading. Thousands of Helm charts and CI/CD pipelines depending on minio/minio images are now broken. Bitnami stopped their MinIO builds too.
Time to migrate. Honestly? For a homelab, Garage is the better choice anyway. 50MB footprint vs 500MB+. Written in Rust. Built-in static web hosting. Actively maintained. MinIO's collapse just forced me to make the switch I should have made earlier.
Here's how to set up Garage on Kubernetes. Takes about 15 minutes.