I like proxmox.
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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What's the elevator pitch?
camera zooms in
whispering behind hand
“It’s debian with a webui”
you have my attention
What the other person said.
If you have enough resources to run everything as a vm and wanna use a webui that starts at “data center” and lets you drill your tree down from that then you’ll have a good time. You can get good at having big buckets of resources and allocating them to little VMs, or figuring out where the bottleneck is or whatever.
If you have a casio wristwatch that hosts your stuff the. It’s probably gonna be too much though.
That's pretty much the whole pitch. I think its bigger value might be in clustering multiple proxmox machines together and being able to load balance services across different host servers, but I haven't done anything with that.
The UI provides an easy interface for spinning up containers/VMs and doing networking shit. Otherwise it's just Debian. I was surprised how easily I got my old proxmox machine which hadn't been switched on since 2019 upgraded to a currently supported version. Was something like 5 consecutive full system upgrades and I didn't expect it to go smoothly but it did.
Basic use case: i want a NAS that will serve up a time machine volume
Is this overkill?
Perhaps. But if you have the resources (I'm running an n100 with 16g ram and it can handle a lot, thanks to Linux containers having very low overhead) then proxmox means you can easily add another function later. There are a few self-hosted services that suddenly stop seeming like too much hassle once you already have a virtualization platform with web UI. Maybe you decide you want a torrent client, or a home assistant installation, or next cloud etc etc
In terms of “could I do this with less?” yes it’s overkill.
In terms of “will I wish I had always been using this?” No, it’s not overkill.
I did everything all on one device, bare metal, a mixture of virtual environments and what not to make sure it all worked. It sucks when a torrent client taking a dump kills your nas.
When I switched to proxmox it was the perfect solution to all my problems built right on top of the system I already knew well.
Here comes a car metaphor: I have a boat. It’s about the tiniest boat that exists but just barely big enough with rigging to need a trailer. The trailer is so light even with the boat loaded that to change a tire I can just lift it up on to blocks.
Naturally I’ve towed it with a compact car. I even resisted towing it with a full size truck because who needs that? It’s so little!
But now I always tow with a truck. Safety alone from the wider side mirror placement and higher rear view is night and day. The actual real brake light hookup means the lights on the trailer reflect my actual indicators and now when I launch I have an easier time getting back up the wet muddy ramp to park. It’s also nice to have a whole bed to carry poles, coolers, etc.
If you can resist the temptation to just download and run bobs real good container then I’d go with proxmox or something like it.
If youre going to use docker or similar it doesn't really matter what base operating system you use, so itd just be the one that has the most up to date packages and smallest footprint.
If you're not going that route you could try using nixpkgs which replaces docker containers with programmatic modules. NixOS on the server allows for declarative configuration with rollbacks and transactional upgrades built right into the system. You can also orchestrate docker containers in nixpkgs.
NixOS does look compelling
I don't want to run something like arch that needs adult supervision. I want something to set and forget while I'm not actively tinkering
There's a large up-front cost in learning nixpkgs and the language, but once you do it becomes really intuitive on how to manage your system. You can get started with installing it on-top of an existing system (https://lix.systems/) and going through https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/ which explains the nixpkgs design from first principles.
+1 for NixOS, Lix or Guix might also work, but I haven't tried them.
Other than something like the already mentioned Proxmox, TrueNAS, Nix and things that just work entirely differently, not really. The only thing I'd add in there is something like Ublue's CoreOS built on top of Fedora if you're interested in atomic stuff. It comes with Cockpit already set up for a web interface. Assuming youre going to do everything in Docker or Podman already, its nice to have an atomic base to work from.
If you don't run VMs, then Proxmox is probably overkill and even then. I'm not a Nix fan because the knowledge curve to even get started doesn't seem worth it just for a home server. The advantage with Nix is reproducibility across many machines. And things like TrueNAS can be more annoying to work with for actual services if you're using it as both a NAS and server.
This is great info, thanks
I use Ubuntu because I had it on my desktop but honestly, it's no different. Maybe the installer has a few more enterprise setting options, but if I were to remake my server, I would probably just go with debian.
fwiw.....
I have ubuntu on a mini pc for an internal server (running a couple of dockerized apps and homebridge)...works great! I'm getting another mini pc for hosting public stuff and will either use freebsd or openbsd with cloudflared running. No other reason than it'll be fun to run something other than linux for a change 
As for choosing ubuntu for the internal server - no strong reason at all aside from some potential disinfo that it is "easier" than debian. I just needed something to run docker on (as through the curse of modern software development, that's all I've "run" for like the last decade, and before that, it was Heroku). Back in the day I used Slackware and Red Hat, but neither of those options seemed fun anymore in a modern world. 
I use Alpine Linux for my server and I'm very happy with it. Nice, clean, lightweight OS. It's mostly a matter of personal preference. If you like using Debian, there's nothing wrong with that. Go with an OS you like using.
I love my Unraid server, makes things really easy and runs off a thumb drive.