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?
You’re more of an expert in home-server stuff than me, but here’s what I do and my reasons why, maybe they can help you find an answer yourself.
I’ve chosen Arch for my homeserver (contrary to most people prefering Debian) since:
I don’t use a docker image and I don’t see its necessacity (again, you know better then me). I’ve seen however servers that use NixOS because they can have the whole infrastructure/system in a git repo, which makes moving to a new server easy and without issues, which is not your case since you’ll be running it on the same machine.
I’ve never used proxmox but if it’s specifically built for what you’re looking (ie. home server) then go for it even if it’s overkill. For me personally, Arch works great as a server.
fwiw, I’ve got fedora and ubuntu on the server, I don’t interact much with the underlying os, everything is in a container. The user (me) facing differences are that I’ve got podman on fedora, docker on ubuntu. Selinux on fedora vs apparmor. Cockpit on fedora vs no cockpit preinstalled on ubuntu.
I could also use arch as a base, to me, the user, it wouldn’t make much difference other than that I would have to manually install and setup all the tools that are already setup on fedora. It’s all linux.