I was more like, ranting, rather than anything on the proxmox side of things. Generally, proxmox is widely popular in homelabs. I’ve first heard of it from a colleague, whom I worked with to implement it in our production. Been using it since version 5. Later on, I’ve started seeing it in a tons of homelabs online. This year I’ve seen it in productions in the wild as well, which I was surprised.
It’s pretty versatile and on the basics, it trades blows with VMWare. It still doesn’t have all bells and whistles, like ROCev2 (RDMA), but it’s got all the normal stuff you’d expect from a mature virtualization platform: live migration, high availability and (somewhat recently) the ability to deploy it as a hyperconverged infrastructure (meaning the servers will run both the VMs and storage on one box and all of them splitting the workloads with the others when it comes to storage, by utilizing Ceph, which is supported in the GUI by proxmox).
I’m not sure if all of these make sense to you as of right now and I’d encourage you to not look too deep into them. Once you learn some more, if you want to gain more knowledge, definitely look into these, maybe experiment with them in VMs in proxmox.
Advantages for proxmox against truenas scale is that the host os can be messed with. Both of them are based on debian, but teunas prevents you from installing things directly into it and messing with the CLI, in favor of using the GUI to manage it. Proxmox offers flexibility in that regards, because, like mentioned above, you can install things as if it was debian, like plex and portainer.
Jay has some videos on it, intermit.tech does, TechnoTim, STH (I think), Level1Techs, Craft Computing… Lots of youtubers do. More popular than TrueNAS Core (the original), because of how much power it has.
Despite this, I personally stopped using it. It’s still good software, but my needs changed and I’m looking into microVMs (because I started purchasing very low-powered hardware, especially ARM single board computers). I wouldn’t recommend looking into that yet, as the documentation is not really “out there” yet (as in, how-to tutorials and quick rundowns).
Proxmox supports LXC out of the box. Combined with Portainer, you can pack quite a lot of services into Proxmox without having to create VMs, which generally have a bigger resource penalty for emulating all the hardware. LXC (linux containers) and OCI containers (i.e. docker, podman, kubernetes etc.) are similar, but LXC should be more treated like a “VM-lite,” while OCI containers (what portainer runs) should be treated like services.
They are similar technology, but LXC is more like traditional VMs, where you manage them just like any other linux distro, while docker is like managing an orchestration stack to launch services like a web server. But both of them have a limitation and that is not having a kernel, being restricted by some host OS sandboxing and many times being unable to combine it with technologies outside of the container (like NFS) without a lot of headaches. Which is why I suggested you first run them straight on proxmox, rather than trying to deploy Docker or k3s inside LXC (which is doable). Similarly, the sandbox prevents access to physical hardware, which plex would need to do faster transcoding of media (it can be done inside either LXC or docker, but again, a lot more headaches involved).
I think that’s about it.