Leaving Proxmox

Proxmox
1

I’ve been running Proxmox for well over a year now and have it installed on four systems. Recently I’ve been thinking about what I would do if I had to restore from a catastrophic failure. It got me thinking about simplifying and moving to something like Ubuntu. Ubuntu wouldn’t be opinionated about me running docker containers on the host (I currently run them in a VM) and I could ditch LXC.

I feel like Proxmox has become a pet and I really want cattle. The dream would be Ubuntu configured via ansible.

Im also using proxmox’s built in backup on the VMs and LXCs even though everything is on zfs. It feels rather duplicative.

Has anybody been on a journey away from proxmox?

2 Likes
2

I learned on vanilla Ubuntu in the first place, and I wanted to like Proxmox but it always felt far more like it was getting in my way than it was helping.

Look into virt-manager for managing your KVM VMs on vanilla Ubuntu. Really nice tool.

3

Concur with this advice. I’ve been using virt-manager in this way with both Ubuntu server and workstation on a number of systems: does the job, no real problems. Maybe someday it will be fully functional with Bhyve hypervisor too :wink:

4

I’ve tried both Proxmox and TrueNAS, went back to plain Fedora with Cockpit and ZFS installed. Cockpit is a really competent and underappreciated project and there’s even a decent ZFS management module for it.

As for switching to cattle, I’ve started migrating my homelab to bootc based images from Universal Blue project. I already have my OS customizations in git and images built by a CI pipeline. I haven’t been this excited since I’ve discovered virtual machines.

5

Almost the same for me. I tried proxmox, unraid and truenas. At the end I am back to debian +zfs + docker + portainer.

1 Like
6

I agree that cockpit is underated! I’m moving to Docker these days, from Podman, but I’ve long used cockpit to mange ZFS, Podman, and KVM on Debian installs - Setup via Ansible.

I’m migrating to Dockge and Docker these days, but it’s still on Debian.

If I needed a system for a team - Proxmox, et. al. are great. But, for me, it’s my homelab.. Keep it simple.

1 Like
7

May I ask why to choose dockge instead of portainer? I have looked into dockge but it is has some limitiations.

  1. dockge does not check for available updates of docker containers. portainer is telling me if there is an update available for adguard, nextcloud, etc. And this is not only major updates for the applications itself, like nextcloud 32.0.3 to 32.0.4, but this is also small security fixes provided as an update to the image. I do not want to miss that.

  2. dockge does not have a role based access model and no smartphone app. I am monitoring my docker environment with a iphone app (yomo). But I do not want to have full admin rights with my smartphone. Therefore I have a “viewer” account in portainer. This only works with the portainer Business Edition. But this is free for personal use.

  3. portainer has a backup functionality where it saves all configs and settings in a tar.gz file. That includes all stacks. Very convenient.

8

:laughing:

Sure, you can ask: Buddy of mine suggested it. :slight_smile:

Spinning up portainer now to kick the tires! Dockge and cockpit-podman accomplish very similar tasks, so it was a pretty easy swap for me. I was looking for a quick web interface to show me big issues, and allow me to get my hands dirty with Docker. It’s nice to have a button to get into the container/restart/etc. and the logs right there. But, no double Portainer can do the same, and a bit more :slight_smile:

9

One major benefit of dockge is that it does not “steal” your compose files and you can use it with existing common compose file layouts. Portainer uses its own weird directory layout you’re probably not supposed to manually touch.

10

Portainer stores the docker compose files in the /data directory. I have mapped that directory in the portainer docker compose file to

   volumes:
      - /mnt/zData/docker/portainer/data:/data

And here you find /data/compose with all the compose files. And portainer is doing a versioning. When you change a compose file in the portainer GUI, the old file is not overwritten, but a new version is created.

Example:
On my file system /data/compose looks like this:

# ls -l compose/
insgesamt 54
drwxr-xr-x   6 root root   6 2025-08-22@11:39 2
drwx------   3 root root   3 2025-06-06@12:34 22
drwxr-xr-x  20 root root  20 2026-01-16@09:57 3
drwx------  14 root root  14 2026-02-02@16:41 33
drwx------  39 root root  40 2025-11-21@17:16 37
drwxr-xr-x   7 root root   7 2025-09-15@12:25 4
drwx------   9 root root   9 2025-11-03@16:25 42
drwxr-xr-x  18 root root  18 2025-10-07@09:13 5
drwxr-xr-x 124 root root 124 2026-02-11@10:06 6
drwx------   6 root root   6 2026-02-20@08:57 62

Each docker application has a number which is shown in the GUI.. e.g adguard is number 42 in my case. And I have 7 versions of the adguard docker compose file:

# ls -lR 42
42:
insgesamt 4
drwx------ 2 root root 3 2025-10-14@12:11 v1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 3 2025-10-14@12:15 v2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 3 2025-10-14@12:15 v3
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 3 2025-10-14@12:21 v4
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 3 2025-10-15@13:04 v5
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 3 2025-11-02@11:05 v6
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 3 2025-11-05@08:28 v7

42/v1:
insgesamt 5
-rw------- 1 root root 380 2025-10-14@12:11 docker-compose.yml

42/v2:
insgesamt 5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 377 2025-10-14@12:15 docker-compose.yml

42/v3:
insgesamt 5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 398 2025-10-14@12:15 docker-compose.yml

42/v4:
insgesamt 5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 446 2025-10-14@12:21 docker-compose.yml

42/v5:
insgesamt 5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 448 2025-10-15@13:04 docker-compose.yml

42/v6:
insgesamt 5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 446 2025-11-02@11:05 docker-compose.yml

42/v7:
insgesamt 5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 406 2025-11-05@08:28 docker-compose.yml

I find this very convenient and from my point of view this is far from “stealing” the compose files.

The versioning of the files is a nice goodie.

11

Yeah. I kicked the tires on Portainer, but it’s not for me. I like the relative simplicity of Dockge, though I did pair it with WUD to let me know when I have outdated images.

Portainer is, I’m sure, great for some but it’s not what I am looking for.