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?

  • Adubya@feddit.onlineEnglish
    3·
    23 hours ago

    I’d say Arch Linux if you are sure about doing something else than Proxmox. The wiki and help posted on the internet might benefit Arch switch currently. You can get the experience you are looking for and it doesn’t box you out of using Nix. Arch will get you going sooner IMO.

    NixOS seems fun though and I’ve only recently starting messing with it. You will do best engaging with what you prefer best. The NixOS switch could pay better dividends in the future though.

    If I recall this hasn’t been the first time NixOS has had to consider Palmer/Anduril. You could keep an eye out for the auxolotl project that is doing an alternative/fork of Nix.