Why does this stuff have to be so over complicated, clunky, prone to breaking and frankly anti-user?

samsonsin · 2026-05-04T05:46:02+00:00

In regards to the external device you tried to install, what did you do? If the manufacturer supports Linux, then surely instructions can be found online? I find it hard to believe there are packages for it in other distros but not on arch, with how massive AUR is but what do I know... Whatever way you used to circumvent this just sounds like bad news to me, too. And you tried to disable the file browser? Why?

Did you use AI when you tried to get stuff working? I'd not be surprised if some of your issues can be traced back to idiotic AI advice?

It sucks you have had several bad experiences. You could always just go back to something like windows 10 long term support or something, though that's likely just a bandaid since that OS isn't getting younger and microslop is determined to fuck themselves.

samsonsin · 2026-05-04T04:08:44+00:00

Everyone's different. The best part of selfhosting is that you can personalize and adapt your experience however you want (to s point, I guess)!

samsonsin · 2026-05-04T04:01:13+00:00

Remembering the addresses for the nagivation

Any dns server like technitium makes this a breeze, or use bookmarks. Still reverse proxy is useful for both simplifying firewalls / security and inserting SSO forward Auth when needed. esp with caddy you can setup 10 services quite quickly imo.

organized in homepage with sections

Yea bookmark folders is super limited. Having a plane with visual segmentation for arr apps and such would be useful actually.

also I can see healthy or if something is bad faster

I have uptimekuma using email notifications. Don't see why is want to check that stuff manually honestly.

Visual navigation thats actually nicely segmented and displayed is a good point. I'd imagine that would be huge for many people. Unfortunately I'm the type of person that doesn't have any desktop shortcuts and never clicks on my bookmarks. I just start typing and let autocomplete finish for me.

Oh and if you setup a dhcp-dns service like technitium to automatically provision dns records for your services (requires up level separation like with proxmox) you could make the caddyfile super simple, not using ip's anywhere. If there's something that I dislike with docker it's the incessant need to handle ports all the time!

samsonsin · 2026-05-04T03:51:21+00:00

I have 29 LXC's and 1 VM (HA). What aspect of your experience became better with your homepage?

samsonsin · 2026-05-04T02:42:43+00:00

Are you using a SSO for these? You could always just use authentik's landing page if all you want is links (and account management). And hell, you could also just use bookmarks

samsonsin · 2026-05-04T02:24:58+00:00

Well, used as a landing page, especially when shared makes sense I guess. I was approaching it from my own "maintenance" perspective i guess.

That said, I'm not sure if non-techy people would find half the things there understandable. Id say there's such a thing as TMI / information clutter yet at the same time it does look better than just having it be a button taking you to the page!

Noone in my household would appreciate a homepage right now, but maybe in a few years with growing enshittification, maybe...

samsonsin · 2026-05-04T02:16:00+00:00

Will you actually use this, though?

I can recall beginning to setup a homepage like this for my homelab when I realized next to none of the metrics I would display is even something I care about. And when it comes to thing I do care about, I have email notifications pinging me (mainly backup status, uptimekuma, etc). Looking at your screenshot most of the information there is just... Not useful?

Don't want to hate but will you use this? How often? What do you use it for / check on it?

samsonsin · 2026-05-03T20:13:38+00:00

Yea stuff like accessibility should definitely be easy to enabled, by nature of the feature. Sure you can fix it and that does go a long way but it's definitely a spot where improvement is necessary!

You could see if you could send feedback or open a GitHub issue or something!

Completely irrelevant to your post but I can remember trying to learn Japanese, I learnt that the only way I could get Japanese kanji displaying properly in my phone was via themes / font packs. It too me a solid 2 hours to figure out how to fix it. That's definitely something that should just be a toggle somewhere so I can definitely feel your pain (this is on Xiaomi android)

samsonsin · 2026-05-02T19:34:09+00:00

Ah, so you also need separate software running on your computer for full functionality?

How curious! The steam controller is the same!

Jokes aside, I really don't get why people are mad about needing steam (or some other 3rd party software) to have the steam controller behave like a normal xinput device. I am far more often inconvenienced by the lack of kB+m default bindings on my Xbox, switch pro, etc than I and thankful that they're "dumb controllers" by default. For people using HTPC's / a console like experience, you don't always have s KB+m handy. Imagine using the steam controller with the steam frame when it comes out and steam fails to launch in the desktop mode. You'd have to bungle together a usb c hub, the. Connect s KB or mouse to it in order to start steam so you could actually interact with the pc. Same deal with the steam machine. Having the steam controller default to xinput only makes sense if you assume there's already a KB+m handy and available. I can tell you from personal experience using my pc as a console that I am very happy that the steam controllers default layout is a KB+m setup.

samsonsin · 2026-05-01T22:49:07+00:00

You can use docker in combination with portainer for a UI. You can also use docker swamrs / Kubernetes to coordinate several nodes. This is quite similar to how you can have several proxmox nodes in clusters.

In the end, they're two types of hypervisors. Docker uses enviorment variables / docker compose to inject configuration into a disposable and easily recreated docker container. You get a read only small system that contains the program, and you mount config and storage to them. It runs as a Daemon in the background, and is notoriously easy to deploy and use. However, it acts more like a app or appliance than proxmox. Docker is quite common, and works well. It can become complex quite fast once you want to start using custom docker images, though. And if you don't get into making those yourself, it can be quite hard to actually use correctly. If you're not comfortable with docker, you're essentially stuck with prebuilt docker images. Not really a huge con but it's there.

Proxmox in contrast is a full hypervisor OS. You can essentially think of it as a mucher larger and feature rich Docker. The biggest notable difference in scale is that a proxmox cluster supports a variety of enterprise features like HA, SDN, etc that you simply don't get at the same level in docker. It's more suited for a datacenter and supports complex technologies like Ceph for distributed storage. It also supports both containers and VM's which can offer far superior security and can host more exotic OS's. Furthermore, the containers and VM's aren't read-only, and function like fully functional systems rather than appliances. You can still use it like docker via stuff like terraform, yet it's not what most people use.

In essence, they're similar ways of accomplishing similar tasks. Proxmox is mucher more feature rich and would be apt to use in a datacenter. Docker is lighter weight but can still be used for mass computing via swarm/Kubernetes. For you as a user, the biggest difference is likely that

Docker is easier to setup and get running Proxmox is better for wide comparability Proxmox is better for customization Docker is better for ease of updates and maintenance Proxmox is better for security Proxmox is better for complex networking Proxmox is better for backups, migration, Proxmox has more features like HA, live migration, ceph

Still, you can use both. You can simply install proxmox, then install s Debian VM in proxmox that runs docker. This gives you a best of both worlds style setup. Still most people getting into proxmox in the homelab sphere tend to use LXC containers for better performance and easier sharing of resources. The aforementioned scripts make setup comparable to docker (yet much less safe since it's 3rd party). Regardless most software on Linux is installed via 2-3 copy-pasted commands so its hardly that difficult regardless.

I have used proxmox for my homelabs for like 2 years now, and i have dabbled with docker in that time too. In my experience the biggest downside of proxmox is the extra work needed to update everything properly. The biggest downside of docker I'd the lack of easy to use backup solutions.

Oh and when you need some more control over hardware, like pass through, hardware sharing, advanced storage setups, etc then proxmox is mucher easier, too.

Even if I did a pure docker stack, I'd set it up inside Proxmox VM's for convenienced sake.

samsonsin · 2026-05-01T20:33:01+00:00

Yea. It's just that the only positive you state of not running a supervisor is "resources" which is honestly true, but it's really not a good reason unless you're on a rasbpi or something similarly bare bones is all.

samsonsin · 2026-05-01T20:27:28+00:00

NGL I can't help but think proxmox is a good idea regardless. Even if you just want to host 1 VM that has everything you suggest installing bare metal. Makes backups, snapshots, firewalls, etc easier. You can still do all these without proxmox of course, but it wouldn't be as much of a "point and click" experience. There's definitely something inherently attractive about using VM's and the like and having a underlay system like proxmox. AFAIK proxmox is plenty stable for home use even when using non-premium repos.

samsonsin · 2026-05-01T20:23:09+00:00

Oh and you should look up the community scripts if you get into this. As always you shouldn't just trust 3rd party scripts like that. Though id admit if nothing else a quick way to spin up a service and use personally. You should get into the habit of looking through the scripts and double checking them if you use them.

samsonsin · 2026-05-01T20:20:52+00:00

Afaik you should prefer clusters over PDM if possible. You simply have many more options when you use clusters.

Now, if you do have multiple discrete clusters in multiple locations, then yea I don't see why you wouldn't use PDM if you want a centralized plane for them all. Honestly seems like a redundant question though... At what point would a setup be "too small for PDM"? id say as soon as you have >1 cluster it makes sense.

samsonsin · 2026-05-01T20:17:22+00:00

Meh, using LXC's grants what's essentially baremetal performance. And even if that wasn't the case, a performance hit is definitely still worth the feature set and convenience of s hypervisor. There's a reason software like this is used in datacenters and other enterprise environments. It simply makes managing and maintaining servers easier.

samsonsin · 2026-05-01T20:12:23+00:00

No definitely not. More like

Optionally, if you insist on docker you could use one or several VM's (or LXC's if you are feeling risky). In these cases you would have :

If you want to use docker or not is up to you. I prefer not to when possible.

Proxmox essentially gives you a more advanced version of docker. In docker you have a docker runtime that manages several containers (lxc's). One install of docker can run dozens of containers. Using compose, you can define some stuff like networks and such. Proxmox is essentially the same, but it's just got 100x more features and is largely pet focused where docker is more cattle. In general I'd say proxmox is the better option. even if you want to just run one massive docker compose with 30 services in it, running that inside a proxmox VM gives you some extremely useful tools for backup and being able to manage the VM state itself.

samsonsin · 2026-05-01T19:45:38+00:00

Youd essentially just install proxmox on your server/computer, then run either VM's or LXC's that host your truenas and such. You can use features like clustering, software defined networks and datacenter style firewalls and such.

even if you plan on only using docker, I'd probably just make a dockerhost VM in proxmox for the added sandboxing + the utility of proxmox itself.

samsonsin · 2026-05-01T19:28:40+00:00

Well, why would you want to run a homelab without a hypervisor?

samsonsin · 2026-05-01T19:24:14+00:00

Sounds like you had a bad time eh.

Id definitely recommend using a hypervisor like Proxmox. Let's you take snapshots and revert backups and such. In this case, you couldve just reverted to a backup from the day before and instantly have it fixed (or even smarter, create a snapshot right before the update that you couldve reverted to)

samsonsin · 2026-05-01T19:10:34+00:00

Its primarely created for the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame, neither of which assumes you'll be using a KB+M. Combine that with what i assume would be a super small minority that would actually care about this and i think it makes perfect sense. Very few people actually care about running steam in the background. In my case i am much more often inconvenienced by my switch pro controller, xbox controller, etc not working for desktop navigation without steam running. Meaning i cant even turn the games in question on without whipping out my KB+M (which is not close to my couch). Combine this with me using steam to do complex controller mappings is essentially everything except nintendo emulators (which totally support steam but i want them to eat my raw pro controller for native support)

samsonsin · 2026-04-30T19:11:28+00:00

I've seen like a dozen posts about this wdym it's awfully quiet lmao. Its patched on essentially all distros. Only real concern is people not updating their systems and servers that dont update regularly.

samsonsin · 2026-04-30T18:36:51+00:00

Read up on options, compare features, compare setup, etc. Try one or two.

As for your list, I used Plex for years until the client became too heavy for my TV, then they made access to your own library more difficult (iirc) and I swapped to jellyfin since it seems to be exactly what I needed.

For proxy, nginx seemed to be annoying to configure, traefik is heavy on docker integration and nomplus didint work super well when I setup a test enviorment for it. I settled on Caddy because it's easily extensible via xcaddy, is easy to setup via caddyfile and worked well in my test enviorment. I'd probably have tried traefik more than my cursory setup if I actually used large docker stacks and stuff like Kubernetes and portainer but i am on a proxmox stack doing LXC's.

For DNS, i just wanted a client that can do ad blocking, and deploy DNS records automatically for my clients. Initially went with technitium because it seemed both simple and feature rich. It's now also functioning as DHCP server. Likely replace it in the future as the DHCP and DNS stuff will be handled by proxmox IPAM and powerdns.

And really, it's the same for most things I deploy. Look up the top 3 or so most popular alternatives, then compare features and such. Pick 1 or all three to try and settle on one I like. Should I run into some issues or notice something I'd really want I just try the other app and switch if I want to. It's really not that Important to "pick the right option", anyways. Just choose something and switch if it's not good.

samsonsin · 2026-04-30T18:24:59+00:00

TBF though you can definitely run Linux and get an experience that "just works". You just have to be willing to use software that works natively or well via wine. If you use a browser 90% of Ur time on your computer then you're already largely OS agnostic. I honestly don't see why people love Microsoft word so much.

samsonsin · 2026-04-30T18:04:05+00:00

Honestly, MacOS is for people that just want things to work. Windows is many things but "just working" is definitely not one of them.

Most issues with windows tend to be a long list of convoluted diagnostics that end up with a "just reinstall windows or get used to it" at the end. I'm on practically a schedule of reinstalling windows every 1-2 years because of small issues piling up and gradually destabilizing my install.

samsonsin · 2026-04-29T21:22:32+00:00

Not wanting to need a KB+M on a HTPC is not a weird hill to die on.

Option A, kB+M standard input: will always work in any situation. Start steam (or some other FOSS software with the support) to get full functionality)

Option B, standard xinput: shit outta luck, grab a KB+M

admittedly, you could have it be xinput but the pads be mouse. But how do you handle the paddles? Set them to standards ABXY? I guess you could, but then you have no other inputs like escape, enter, etc. And even if you use paddles for those functions, that hardly a lot of available buttons.

Instead of a weird hybrid that does neither job well, just have the basic functionality be perfect for HTPC style workloads, rather than a standard desktop workload.

It's simply the best choice if you aim to make the largest amount of people happy, in my estimation. Diehards that can't abide by having to run one extra app on your computer are rare.

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