I run several different ones, Debian is the most, Ubuntu server runs a few and I have a couple of truenas scale instances simply because they have run truenas for years and work well. One is local network only, another is available but is used for storage and storage alone via s3/minio and sftp and duplicati
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Rocky Linux. Been using debian but I like firewalld a bit more than ufw, and I don't trust myself enough to let myself touch iptable.
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Stage 1: Ubuntu server Stage 2: Ubuntu server + docker Stage 3: Ansible/OpenTofu/Kubernetes Stage 4: Proxmox
oops straight to stage 4.
but wait stage 3 looks daunting
Don't get me wrong, I use libvrt where it makes sense but why would anyone go to proxmox from a full iac setup?
I do 2 at home, and 3 at work, coming from 4 at both and haven't looked back.
Because it is much simpler to provision a VM
Maybe for the initial setup, but nothing is more repeatable than automation. The more manual steps you have to build your infra, the harder it is to recover/rebuild/update later
You automate the VM deployments.
if you're automating the creation and deployment of vms, and the downstream operating systems, and not doing some sort of HA/failover meme setup... proxmox makes things way more complicated than raw libvirt/qemu/kvm.
Can you please elaborate on this? I am currently using MicroOS and think about NixOS because of quick setup. But also about Proxmox and NixOS on top. Where would libvirt fit in in this scenario?
If you ran a raw Ubuntu/fedora/whatever, you can use qemu/libvrt to run small virtual machines as required. You start and stop them with virsh, define them with simple xml files, and can easily automate the creation/destruction of them if desired.
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Debian on the servers, Diet-Pi on the SBC's, all containerized.
Hypervisor: Proxmox (fuck Hyper-V: It's good but soo annoying. Fuck ESXi cuz Broadcom).
General purpose OS (for servers): Debian (and OMV)
Linux
I have a nuc with Linux mint and host everything on docker containers. I expose any service I need through caddy.
Ubuntu Server. It just works.
archlinux + podman / libvirtd + nomad (libvirt and docker plugins) + ansible / terraform + vault / consul sometimes
UPD:
archlinux - base os. You never need change major version and that is great. I update core systems every weekend.
podman / libvirtd - 2 types of core abstractions. podman - docker containers management, libvirtd - VM management.
nomad - Hashicorp orcestrator. You can run exec, java application, container or virtual machine on one way with that. Can integrate with podman and libvirtd.
ansible - VM configuration playbooks + core system updates
terraform - engine for deploy nomad jobs (docker containers. VMs. execs or something else)
Vault - K/V storage. I save here secrets for containers and VMs
consul - service networking solution if you need realy hard network layer
As a result, I'm not really sure if it's a simple level or a complex one, but it's very flexible and convenient for me.
UPD2: As a result, I described the applications level, but in fact it is 1 very thick server on AMD Epic with archlinux. XD By the way, the lemmy node from which I write is just on it. =) And yes, it's still selfhosted.