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Comment by briHass | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend anyone going this route to use Proxmox as your base install on the (old) hardware, and then use individual LXCs/VMs for the services you run. Maybe it's just me, but I find LXCs to be much easier to manage and reason about than Docker containers, and the excellent collection of scripts maintained by the community: https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts makes it just as easy as a Docker container registry link.

I try to use LXCs whenever the software runs directly on Debian (Proxmox's underlying OS), but it's nice to be able to use a VM for stuff that wants more control like Home Assistant's HAOS. Proxmox makes it fairly straightforward to share things like disks between LXCs, and automated backups are built in.

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I think it depends on the usecase (and budget) as to what's 'best' really. I've got Proxmox running on a couple of servers and it's great.

But I also run Unraid on the main NAS server purely for its ZFS drive setup. Being able to throw in a bunch of drives of various sizes and brands on a home machine is pretty valuable and saves a huge amount of money.

I think it depends what you’re used to. LXC containers I see as more of a lightweight pseudo VM, whereas docker is more about truly ephemeral containers that you don’t maintain, but instead throw away and replace regularly just keeping data.

Yep my entire set up is based on Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server. Even my gaming PC is Proxmox with GPU being passed through to a VM. Couldn't be happier.

I use lxd to manage lxc containers. Am I missing out on anything?

A handy mostly straightforward UI with built in backup/restore and other useful tools.

It's hardly a requirement but if someone is just starting to learn, proxmox has lots of documentation on how to do things and the UI keeps you from footgunning yourself copy/pasting config code off websites/LLM too much.

Personally, I didn't want to manage my management/virtualization layer. I wanted something that was an all-in iso that wouldn't tempt me to configure at all. I wanted to be able to restore just my container backups to a new PM install without worrying about anything missing at the host (to the extent possible).

I also like that Proxmox can be fully managed from the web UI. I'm sure most of this is possible with LCD on some distro, but Proxmox was the standard at the time I set it up (LXD wasn't as polished then)

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