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?
I’m on Proxmox because I don’t have time to learn my way around my entire homelab, so I need tutorials and Proxmox has the biggest community. I use Coolify for easy deployments and testing software.
Same thing with Docker, I don’t like it, but I can’t afford using an alternative yet.
But I wish I could get away with using Ublue core + cockpit + podman quadlets + QEMU/KVM. But man, the Fedora & Cockpit docs are so newbie unfriendly, and the Cockpit community is pretty much non-existant compared to Proxmox. There’s no one doing tutorials for it on youtube, while you can find a new PVE tutorial every single day.
My advice is go towards where your own priorities are. If you don’t want to support a certain mindset, just don’t. If you want to do it the manual way and learn everything you can, then go with Arch, they’ve got the greatest Linux wiki that has ever been written. If you want easy to follow tutorials stay with PVE. If you want an unbreakable system go with Ublue core or Ubuntu core (I’m personally not liking Canonical though).
Follow your thirst for knowledge, In a few years you’ll be a pro.