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?

  • coltn@lemmy.ml
    1·
    7 hours ago

    sorry if my reply seemed too negative towards you. I was mostly curious about the issues you had and sorting them out… It’s good you enjoy it! like I said, I think for specific people… these types of issues are much more interesting than dealing with issues that come with other platforms.

    I wonder if your system update/hyprland issue was when they moved away from wlroots?

    AUR isn’t really recommended. Because it’s managed by users, you’re essentially running install scripts that may or may not be maintained by randos (of course, i’m simplifying–but i think this is a fair way to look at it). Personally, if possible I’ll always choose flatpak > AUR–and AUR only when necessary. That being said, I do install from the AUR, and I love that it exists and is available… I just avoid it when possible.

    Updating once a year is rough. But even then with your issues, imo i’d weigh those to how difficult a windows update for 10 -> 11 or going from Debian 12 -> 13… If I was only using my computer once a month or so, I’d likely run Debian. But I do have a second laptop that I rarely use, but it runs arch with DWM and almost nothing else GUI besides a web browser and “it just works”… even after a month or so there isn’t much to updated, cause it only has like 500 or packages installed lol

    if you haven’t already, i recommend maybe trying to set up a systemd timer for refreshing reflector? I run it manually whenever I find that downloading updates is slow or fails… in the past I had a bash script in my $PATH called update.sh that would run reflector, run yay, and then update flatpak (I put it in my $PATH, because at the time I was testing the water with different shells, and didn’t want to have to update .bashrc, .zshrc and fish config etc).