no, i'm not switching to proxmox

every time i post about my homelab someone crawls out of the woodwork to ask "but why aren't you on proxmox?" and i'm just... so tired of answering this.

so here it is, once and for all.

proxmox is cool. i just don't need it.

i run jellyfin, navidrome, immich, adguard home, a couple discord bots, an internet radio setup with liquidsoap and icecast, a tidal downloader, and a bunch of other random stuff on a minimal debian 13 install. it works. it's fast, it's clean, it's mine. docker compose does exactly what i need it to do and i don't have to think about it.

proxmox is genuinely great software, i'm not here to dunk on it. but there's this weird thing in the homelab community where if you're not running proxmox + VMs + containers inside VMs inside a whole orchestration stack, you're somehow doing it wrong. be serious. i'm not running critical infrastructure. i'm hosting my media, my music, my photos, and blocking ads.

the "but what if you want to run VMs" argument

i don't. and even if i did, i can run VMs on debian just fine. this isn't a gotcha, it's just reality. proxmox makes VM management really smooth, sure, but spinning up a KVM on debian isn't exactly rocket science either.

the pitch for proxmox is basically "it's easier to manage lots of things." i have like eight containers. i can manage them with my eyes closed at this point.

and then there's the reinstall

look, even if proxmox somehow solved every problem i don't have, i'm not reinstalling everything. my setup is dialed in. my compose files are clean. immich has months of photos indexed. navidrome knows my whole library. jellyfin has my watched history. my internet radio stack is actually running smoothly for once. my discord bots are up.

you want me to wipe all of that to move to a platform that gives me features i wasn't asking for? ngl that sounds like a terrible saturday.

minimal is a feature

there's something genuinely nice about knowing exactly what's on your machine. debian 13, docker, compose, done. no web UI for the OS itself, no abstraction layer i didn't ask for. when something breaks i know where to look.

proxmox adds a lot but it also adds a lot, if you know what i mean. for a homelab that's not hosting anything important, that tradeoff just doesn't make sense to me.

if you're running a server rack with 10 services and actual uptime requirements, yeah, proxmox makes sense. but if you're like me and just want your stuff to run without babysitting it, a minimal debian install with docker is more than enough. the hype around proxmox makes it sound like anything else is amateur hour and that's just not true.

stay unbothered lads :P <3