Here’s my journey from arch to proxmox back to arch: https://bower.sh/homelab

I was in your shoes and decided to simplify my system. It’s really hard to beat arch and I missed having full control over the system. Proxmox is awesome but it felt overkill for my use cases. If I want to experiment with new distros I would probably just run distrobox or qemu directly. Proxmox does a lot but it ended up just being a gui on top of qemu with some built in backup systems. But if you end up using zfs anyway … what’s the benefit?

IP and copyright are both tools used to control individuals, not corporations. We are seeing the reality in realtime with LLMs disregarding them wholesale.

Many political terms are so emotionally charged they are virtually useless except to insight controversy. In media it’s all a complete distraction to cause in-fighting and control how we think

I’ve been slowly working on a set of decoupled services that could replace some aspects of GitHub.

https://pr.pico.sh/ — a pastebin supercharged for git collaboration.

https://pgit.pico.sh/ — static site generator for git repos.

Both are still WIP but I think they are pretty handy

If you want low effort high value then get a synology 2 bay. If you want full control over the host OS then run Debian/arch with zfs

I didn’t use any of the terms you used in your post. I’m not using those products in part for the reasons I discussed but also I don’t see it particularly useful beyond a cult of personality building it.

This was a really great read. The numbers don’t lie: 7 companies each independently invested 100 bn in AI and have seen little revenue in return (relatively speaking). When overlaying that on top of its impact on the us stock market as a whole, once the veil has been lifted that this is not leading to super intelligence, a bubble will burst and the entire economy will feel it.

That doesn’t mean “nothing to see here, move on.” It means that AI isn’t the bow-wave of “impending superintelligence.” Nor is it going to deliver “humanlike intelligence.”

It’s a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers’ lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they’re used.

This is the part that is overlooked when discussing anti-ai hype: these tools are very useful, but they appear only useful to the skilled laborer wielding them, instead of the investor claim that they will be replaced.

I used shotcut for light video editing and it worked great, no complaints

I have the rb5009, love it and routerOS. WireGuard and DDNS was so simple to setup, I found the software much better than unifi.

I went down a similar path as you. The entire proxmox community argues making it an appliance with nothing extra installed on the host. But the second you need to share data — like a nas — the tooling is a huge pain. I couldn’t reliably find a solution that felt right.

So my solution was to make my nas a zfs pool on my host. Bind mounting works for CTs but not VMs which is an annoying feature asymmetry. So I decided to also install an nfs server that exposed my nas.

I know that’s not what you want but just wanted to share what I did.

The feature asymmetry between CTs and VMs basically made CTs not part of my orchestration.

Librefox has been awesome. Once you get the hang of enabling cookies for specific sites it mostly just works. Although Fastmail keeps logging me out for some reason

Here’s my homelab journey: https://bower.sh/homelab

Basically, containers and GPU is annoying to deal with, GPU pass through to a VM is even more annoying. Most modern hobbyist GPUs also do not support splitting your GPU. At the end of the day, it’s a bunch of tinkering which is valuable if that’s your goal. I learned what I wanted, now I’m back to arch running everything with systemd and quadlet

It is being rewritten using swift

This is absolutely not true in my org. LLM use is ramping up where every SWE is using it to some capacity

Im constantly impressed that sway and wlroots is being managed by a single contributor — that didn’t even create those projects! Props to Simon

I’m a big fan of distrobox although I don’t use it much anymore.

I’m of mixed views about this. Omarchy is popular purely because of DHH. I don’t see anything of benefit beyond the notoriety of a famous dev.

There’s also some dissenting opinion about DHH in general that taints the project: https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html

Being based on hyprland also has some potential social issues.

I don’t get why cloudflare didn’t donate to arch instead.

For something super lightweight you can try https://pr.pico.sh/

I agree. For everyone’s sake they should rip Rust out and put all that effort into RedoxOS. There is way too much misalignment for this to be constructive.

The asahi project shouldn’t even exit with Apples purse, this is their job as far as I care. To be honest I would never use asahi for that reason.