I have a Windows 11 VM running in Proxmox. It works fine. I put a desktop with a Windows license in the cluster, passed the hardware ID into the VM, it didn’t work, so I hollered at an MS rep for a bit and they activated it for me. I don’t use it for much, but it works.

I have a really cheap old as the hills desktop with an ancient Quadro gpu in it connected via a decently expensive but also used 10gb Nic to my nas which is running Proxmox and a bunch of containers, but the two interesting ones are a tailscale exit node and Jellyfin. The Jellyfin gets the gpu via pass through, and I get 1080p on tap anywhere in my house with no fuss no muss, and I can use the tailscale app, connect, and act like I’m in my house from anywhere else, including other continents. Noticeable delay on play and pause on media if I’m on the other side of the planet, but that’s it for limitations.

Are you sure you’re passing your gpu through correctly? This didn’t happen to me, but a buddy of mine didn’t do iommu and tried to pass the gpu through to a VM, and he couldn’t boot either. If you boot rescue and change the VM to not start-up on boot? I would definitely post your grub boot line.

I have an old as eff laptop hiding behind my TV, and I use Unified Remote to make my phone act like a wireless mouse and keyboard for it.

Also, Proxmox is basically the answer to “I hate big tech and have a lot of time to kill. How do I deal?” Make one computer into 30 mini servers.

I run substreamer and tailscale to access my home navidrome. Works like a charm.

I have a docker compose immich that I somehow managed to kill fourteen minutes after convincing my wife to switch to it.

I’m a bit farther along, but it’s all been trial and error (and error, and error…) So, commenting because I would also like some of this info. My DNS is a disaster! Still using IPs to access my VMs, mostly.

Back when I first started with NextCloud, it was pretty unresponsive on the web front end for my ebook collection, which was a ton of small files. It’s gotten a whole lot better in the last year or so. Now, I don’t worry about it. This is also with a very badly set up copy. I’m sure that a proper install would work much better, too.

I have a couple of friends with nextcloud, and I have nextcloud too. Low tech ish? But we just host our files on Nextcloud and then copy backups to the other machines every now and then.

My NC uses about 6gb of RAM, and it is really badly optimized, since it’s been running forever and isn’t a container, or even a server deploy. (It’s a snap running in desktop Ubuntu since 2016.)

Anyone could do better, I just can’t be bothered.

My buddy has his running on 1.5GB of RAM in a container.

I also host a bunch of other stuff. Navidrome and freshrss get the most use, other than Nextcloud. Immich, searx-ng, jellyfin, guacamole.

I just did three nodes this evening from 8.4.1 to 9, no issues other than a bit of farting around with my sources.list files.

Not noticing anything significant, but I haven’t tried the mobile interface yet.

I tried Bazzite on an old mid-tier gaming laptop, was Mondo impressed. I basically agree with all the things you said. Amusingly, I find that just general purpose computing is snappier and smoother too, so I wound up using it mostly as my surfing/Plex/shopping machine more than anything else.

Feel free to ask questions if you have them. I am no expert, but I am willing to try to help if you get stuck.

1. You are going to find people who have done both. A lot of NAS devices run kind of low powered CPUs so separating it out into two devices can get you more compute power than a single device. For example, an old as the hills file bay may cost next to nothing, and then using your “last” desktop will get you a lot more storage and compute than a 1500$ modern NAS, but it’ll take up more space, cost more in electricity to run, and make more fan noise. This is the route I went. A modern NAS should be able to run what you listed though.
2. TrueNAS scale is all about storage, but it lets you also run containers. Proxmox is all about virtualization, but you can then run a storage solution inside a VM or container. It’s not the kind of thing you’re going to get a right answer for because either way can work. Both are well-documented, capable solutions. I have tried both at times, but I had a lot more experience with Proxmox by the time I deployed TrueNAS, so I stuck with Proxmox and use a TrueNAS box (bare metal) for backups. It really is a matter of preference.
3. If you have a MiniPC and NAS as separate devices, you will want to set up a network share, so you can seed on the MiniPC the copy that’s on the NAS. My seeding, Jellyfin, Plex, etc, all happen in a virtual hard drive mounted in a separate container from the services. Each of the services "see that drive as a network share despite being hosted on the same physical hardware.

I have a Tiny connected to a startech dual USB drive dock. The drives get warm, but not deadly hot. Moving big files is a bit slow, but for streaming on Plex and Jellyfin it works fine.

I didn’t know anything about docker when I set up my NC years ago, so I ran it as a snap on bare metal. Man, it’s gotten so much better! It used to really suck. Like, simple file transfers just didn’t work half the time, so I’d be retrying the same thing over and over… A few years ago, I literally migrated it from bare metal to a VM, but kept the exact same install. I have so much crap on it now, I think I’ll never bother switching it out to docker, just because of the inconvenience. I know the snap version can just run using a local hostname, you just have to set it in trusted domains setting. Might be the same in the docker image?

I use Gpoddersync to keep my phone and tablet in sync, but I have one podcast that keeps glitching out and redownloading over and over. Not sure why.

I’ve run yacy and searxng, and I find yacy flaky. I get really random search results, often not useful at all. I like Searxng though, although once in a while I have to hit refresh to get my result. Probably a simple fix, I’ve just never bothered to go down the rabbit hole.

I tried to start with OpenStack. Oof. Yup. Proxmox.

There are a lot of good guides. I run almost everything on proxmox these days, even virtualized my Windows, and (after a lot of messing around) got my GPU passed through for when I game.

No! You shouldn’t have told me that it could be done! Now, the next time I launch gparted, I’ll somehow manage to wipe everything! Not just my system, but, like, all my systems! If it can be broken on a computer, I’ll be the one to break it!

Everyone is going to tell you to use dd. dd if=/dev/oldsdcard of=/dev/newsdcard

Personally, I have actually eaten an entire system by getting the wrong /dev names for the input file and the output file.

Gparted lets you copy whole partitions and resize them, and is graphical. I have yet to destroy my computer using gparted, but I’ve definitely done so with dd. (I’m also an idiot though, so…) Edit: gparted will also let you resize the new SD to the bigger partition size! However, it is actually possible to break your system in gparted too, so make sure you aren’t deleting partitions and stuff in there.