I’ve never used bcachefs and only recently read about some of the drama. I wish the project the best but at this point it is hard to beat zfs

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?

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.

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

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.