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?
Neovim is the same as Vim but with Lua capabilities and a few other niche items. You might can use just Vim. I’ve been testing it for a year, but I don’t see much advantage to it. Ssh is cool and is widely used, so you should learn it. If you ever work in a lab that uses linux or a data center, it will be useful, and it’s not hard. Download putty (ssh client) on any Windows computer and try to get into your linux machine with it. Or just use it in a command line with the destination IP and go from there.
Before you use Arch, just know that it is a bit tougher than the other OS’s. I use it with Hyperland and had to delete, update, and then rebuild half my system just to update the OS because the libraries were out of sync. Arch can be a pain to maintain, and even small things like the package manager mirrors break frequently. So you just need to install or update something, and you end up fighting with pernicious mirror updates to your pacman files instead. It can be annoying. My take on Arch after almost a year is that you have to either be super good at Linux, or be nerdy enough to waste time on Linux nonsense and menial maintenance tasks. If you ever plan to get laid and not stare at a screen, get something more easily manageable. That’s just my opinion, and sometimes I suck, so…
This does not just happen with proper use of pacman. The most common situation where this does happen is called a “partial upgrade”, which is avoidable by simply not running
pacman -Sy. (The one exception is forarchlinux-keyring, though that requires you runpacman -Syuafterwards).Arch is definitely intended for a certain audience. If you don’t intend on configuring your system on the level Arch allows you to, then a different distro might be a better option. That does not mean it’s a requirement, you can install KDE, update once a month, and almost never have to worry about system maintenance (besides stuff that is posted on Archlinux news, once or twice a year, usually a single command).
bummer that you’ve had issues with arch. but i don’t really understand the issues you’ve had. like setting up reflector should solve the mirrors, and checking the newsfeed before updating will solve a lot of other issues. In the last year I think there was only one, maybe two times that there was manual intervention required from me–and they were both trivial; and the convenience of never having to worry about doing a distro upgrade is so nice… Other than that, hyprland is changing frequently so sometimes you need to update your config–but again, just read the release notes or use a wm that updates less (like sway, dwm). But the changes have never taken more than 20 seconds to fix, and they’ve never been breaking for me. Maybe some of your issues were due to the DDOS attacks that have been going on? Also how much do you use the AUR?
while i think this is overstated, i do agree that you need to be a certain kind of person to enjoy arch.
I am not saying I don’t enjoy it. I love it, actually. It only does what I tell it to, so many off the issues are my fault. I use the AUR too much, I’ll bet. Is that not recommended? I have only upgraded Arch once in a year is my issue. I had to basically delete Hyprland and then update Arch because a Iibrary that needed to be updated had dependencies. One problem could be I am 45 and stress has hurt my cognitive function a bit.
I will probably move to using openSuse for my last Windows replacement just to have something a bit more manageable. I will keep the Arch. Although I complain, I feel comfortable with the peace of mind knowing that I built it and it does not have garbage bloat on it.
Edit: Also, my reflector issues are because the update function sometimes does not work. Actually, most of the time, I use pacman, the mirrors are outdated, and I must run reflector, and it rarely works the first time I run it.
sorry if my reply seemed too negative towards you. I was mostly curious about the issues you had and sorting them out… It’s good you enjoy it! like I said, I think for specific people… these types of issues are much more interesting than dealing with issues that come with other platforms.
I wonder if your system update/hyprland issue was when they moved away from wlroots?
AUR isn’t really recommended. Because it’s managed by users, you’re essentially running install scripts that may or may not be maintained by randos (of course, i’m simplifying–but i think this is a fair way to look at it). Personally, if possible I’ll always choose flatpak > AUR–and AUR only when necessary. That being said, I do install from the AUR, and I love that it exists and is available… I just avoid it when possible.
Updating once a year is rough. But even then with your issues, imo i’d weigh those to how difficult a windows update for 10 -> 11 or going from Debian 12 -> 13… If I was only using my computer once a month or so, I’d likely run Debian. But I do have a second laptop that I rarely use, but it runs arch with DWM and almost nothing else GUI besides a web browser and “it just works”… even after a month or so there isn’t much to updated, cause it only has like 500 or packages installed lol
if you haven’t already, i recommend maybe trying to set up a systemd timer for refreshing reflector? I run it manually whenever I find that downloading updates is slow or fails… in the past I had a bash script in my $PATH called
update.shthat would run reflector, run yay, and then update flatpak (I put it in my $PATH, because at the time I was testing the water with different shells, and didn’t want to have to update.bashrc,.zshrcand fish config etc).