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?

  • paequ2@lemmy.today
    5·
    1 day ago

    Arch

    I daily drive Arch on my personal laptop, which is great. I also tried running an Arch server at some point… which I’m not sure about. The updates really start piling up on a server because I’m not running pacman -Syu all the time… which feels bad, but maybe it’s fine? idk. Not sure what other people think.

    NixOS

    There is something called Guix, which is a hard fork of NixOS from a long time ago. It’s not a 1:1 replacement. But it does have some of the big features like reproducible builds. The Guix folks tend to be really loud about running 100% libre open source code, but don’t worry you can’t run non-foss code very easily to get your laptop working. It may not work for your usecase, but just something to know about.

      • paequ2@lemmy.today
        2·
        16 hours ago

        all the Lisp

        I mean, yeah, all of the userland stuff is configured in Lisp. User level guix command is also written in Lisp.

        and replacing systemd with GNU Shepherd which also uses Lisp

        And the lower system is also configured in Lisp and the init program is written in Lisp! 🙌 Guix users would consider that a feature, not a bug. It’s all Lisp! 🥳

        Although, honestly I do wish they just used systemd and had Lisp bindings. Systemd does a lot of useful stuff besides just being an init system. GNU Herd only does basic init system stuff.

        Not to mention that some apps actually depend on systemd to build and/or run, which makes packaging those apps tricky…

        I’ve had an itch to learn a functional language for a while now and Lisp being a general-purpose programming language used for pretty much everything, instead of Nixlang, which is a DSL, that’s used sometimes (a lot of the times? you still need bash.), felt like a good fit for me.

        Also worth noting, you can use guix just as a package manager on any Linux distro. You don’t have to run GuixOS. Same as Nix/NixOS. I was running GuixOS for a few months, but I fell off the wagon and I’m back on Arch, btw for now.

        NixOS is definitely gonna have a bigger software selection, but keep in mind you can install Flatpaks and use distrobox on GuixOS, so you should still be able to install most of your apps. Actually, I believe you can install Nix packages somehow, but I didn’t have a need to try that.