When a laptop starts showing its age, the usual advice is to install Linux to make it faster. While that certainly helps, there’s an even better approach to stop thinking of it as your everyday computer. Instead, turn it into a Linux appliance.

Self-hosting has become easier than ever. Docker Compose, one-click installers, and container-focused operating systems make it possible to deploy dozens of applications in minutes. For many people, that is enough. However, some self-hosted applications benefit from capabilities that containers cannot provide on their own. Features such as snapshots, GPU passthrough, advanced networking, PCI device assignment, kernel customization, and filesystem flexibility often make a virtual machine the better choice. This is where Proxmox stands out.

Anyone building a homelab today has more choices than ever. A few years ago, Unraid was often the first recommendation for anyone who wanted to store files and run Plex. It made home servers approachable, especially for users who did not want to learn enterprise virtualization.