Hey everyone!

I’ve been rocking Proxmox for a little over a year on an old Mac Mini with a failing NIC (I probably damaged it when I installed the SSD). So I decided it was time to get some new used cheap hardware and I have just received a HP Elitedesk 800 G3 SFF, going to throw 32GB of RAM, a 1TB M2 NVMe boot drive and a 4TB SATA drive for media in it (this will replace my external 4TB drive).

Right now in Proxmox I’m running a Docker VM with Debian (Transmission-VPN container, ByteStash, FreshRSS, KaraKeep), another Debian VM for Visual Studio Code so I can remote into VS Code on my Mac and iPad and couple of LXC containers (Plex, Open WebUI and Pi Hole).

Honestly Proxmox feels like overkill for what I’m doing, half of what I’m doing is either individual LXC containers or I find myself SSH’ing into the Docker VM. The Proxmox helper scripts are great, but I feel like I’m not learning much and I don’t know how much I can trust random GitHub URLs.

I’d like to start learning and becoming more self-sufficient with Linux. I was pretty excited by the idea of learning NixOS, get comfortable learning the code and then creating distinct configurations for different systems, including my Mac devices with Darwin… then I was reminded of all the recent bullshit happening in the community… I don’t want to get deep into the discussion in this thread, but I don’t really want to use/support a distro that Palmer Luckey and Anduril are trying to influence and control.

So I’m trying to decide if I should stick with Proxmox, try something like Arch or keep an eye on what’s going down with Nix and have a good backup strategy if the situation worsens.

I’d probably switch from Docker to Podman, use Wayland with Niri and learn NeoVIM and use SSH instead of VS Code remote tunnels.

Based on my current setup and my goals, what would you suggest I do?

  • ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    23 hours ago

    Neovim is the same as Vim but with Lua capabilities and a few other niche items. You might can use just Vim. I’ve been testing it for a year, but I don’t see much advantage to it. Ssh is cool and is widely used, so you should learn it. If you ever work in a lab that uses linux or a data center, it will be useful, and it’s not hard. Download putty (ssh client) on any Windows computer and try to get into your linux machine with it. Or just use it in a command line with the destination IP and go from there.

    Before you use Arch, just know that it is a bit tougher than the other OS’s. I use it with Hyperland and had to delete, update, and then rebuild half my system just to update the OS because the libraries were out of sync. Arch can be a pain to maintain, and even small things like the package manager mirrors break frequently. So you just need to install or update something, and you end up fighting with pernicious mirror updates to your pacman files instead. It can be annoying. My take on Arch after almost a year is that you have to either be super good at Linux, or be nerdy enough to waste time on Linux nonsense and menial maintenance tasks. If you ever plan to get laid and not stare at a screen, get something more easily manageable. That’s just my opinion, and sometimes I suck, so…

    • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
      2·
      21 hours ago

      and had to delete, update, and then rebuild half my system just to update the OS because the libraries were out of sync.

      This does not just happen with proper use of pacman. The most common situation where this does happen is called a “partial upgrade”, which is avoidable by simply not running pacman -Sy. (The one exception is for archlinux-keyring, though that requires you run pacman -Syu afterwards).

      Arch is definitely intended for a certain audience. If you don’t intend on configuring your system on the level Arch allows you to, then a different distro might be a better option. That does not mean it’s a requirement, you can install KDE, update once a month, and almost never have to worry about system maintenance (besides stuff that is posted on Archlinux news, once or twice a year, usually a single command).

    • coltn@lemmy.ml
      2·
      23 hours ago

      bummer that you’ve had issues with arch. but i don’t really understand the issues you’ve had. like setting up reflector should solve the mirrors, and checking the newsfeed before updating will solve a lot of other issues. In the last year I think there was only one, maybe two times that there was manual intervention required from me–and they were both trivial; and the convenience of never having to worry about doing a distro upgrade is so nice… Other than that, hyprland is changing frequently so sometimes you need to update your config–but again, just read the release notes or use a wm that updates less (like sway, dwm). But the changes have never taken more than 20 seconds to fix, and they’ve never been breaking for me. Maybe some of your issues were due to the DDOS attacks that have been going on? Also how much do you use the AUR?

      My take on Arch after almost a year is that you have to either be super good at Linux, or be nerdy enough to waste time on Linux nonsense and menial maintenance tasks.

      while i think this is overstated, i do agree that you need to be a certain kind of person to enjoy arch.