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Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

Watching hypervisors slowly improve over the last few years has been amazing. They aren't quite to the point that I will install them under any new hardware I buy and then put my daily driver OS on top, but they are very close. I think a strong focus on creating 'the OS under your OS' experience seamless could open up a lot more here.

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I'm not sure I would want my daily driver to be a hypervisor... Whats controlling audio, do I really need audio kernel extensions on my hypervisor? Whos in charge when I shut the lid on my laptop...

But the moment you stop trying to do everything locally Proxmox, as it is today, is a dream.

It's easy enough to spin up a VM, throw a clients docker/podman + other insanity onto it and have a running dev instance in minutes. It's easy enough to work remotely in your favorite IDE/dev env. DO I need to "try something wild", clone it... build a new one... back it up and restore if it doesn't work...

Do I need to emulate production at a more fine grained level than what docker can provide: easy enough to build something that looks like production on my proxmox box.

And when I'm done with all that work... my daily driver laptop and desktop remain free of cruft and clutter.

VMware has been so good and reasonably priced for so long that there hasn't been a competitive market in the enterprise virtualization space for the past two decades. In a way, I think Broadcom's moves here might be healthy for the enterprise datacenter longer term, it has created the opportunity for others to step in and broadened the ecosystem significantly.

As my main desktop computers I've been using Fedora and Windows (for gaming only) virtualised on top of a single proxmox host with 2 GPUs passed through for more than 10 years... Upgraded all the way to latest versions (guests and hosts) without ever having to reinstall from scratch. I upgraded the hardware a few times (just cloned the disks), and since the desktops are virtualised, Windows always worked fine without complaining about new hardware drivers (only thing to change was GPU driver)

Another benefit is block-level backups of the VMs (either with qcow2 disks files or ZFS block storage, which both support snapshots and easy incremental backups of changed block data only)

Proxmox is great for this, although maybe not on a laptop unless you're ready to do a lot of tweaks for sleep, etc.

I have a PC where I installed Proxmox on bare metal and put a daily-use desktop OS on top. It works surprisingly well, the trickiest part was making sure the desktop OS took control of video/audio/peripherals.

Yup my primary Windows machine is a VM and after passing through all the relevant peripherals (GPU, USB) it’s pretty seamless and you’d never know.

Cool part is I needed a more powerful Linux shell than my regular servers (NUCs, etc.) for a one off project, so I spun up a VM on it and instantly had more than enough compute.

I always thought it might be cool to be able to do this with a laptop.

I thought it might need gpu virtualization?

do you do it with passthrough?

For many folk's workflows, I'd wager that hypervisors are there and ready. I had a nice time setting up xcp-ng before deciding microk8s fits my needs more betterer; they're just plum good, well documented, and blazing fast.

I think the possibilities are huge with this area. I'd love to see more 'manager' layers that build on top of any 'cloud' system, even a local one, to give you a standard stack that is easy to move. Imagine something that lives at the hypervisor level (that you trust and was mature) taking control of your various cloud accounts to merge them and make it easy to migrate/leave one provider for another. I know that is the promise of terraform but we all want a good, consistent, interface to play with and then build the automation tools on top of. Maybe that is a good direction for proxmox? integrating with cloud providers in a seamless way. Anyway, a lot of promise in this area no matter the direction it takes.

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