Thinking About Installing Proxmox on My Desktop — Is It Worth It?

lalan45

Hi,
I’m wondering if it would be useful to install Proxmox on my desktop PC and run my daily driver OS inside a virtual machine.
The benefit would be having a fully virtualized environment, but I’d lose direct access to some hardware features, like the TPM.
Do you think this setup is worth it, or would it be counterproductive in terms of security?
Thanks for any advice

GrouchyGrape

lalan45 depends what your goals are. Proxmox itself, is a very powerful hypervisor that opens up a huge world of self-hosting. So, if you are limited on hardware and want to run more than just windows, I would say go for it. If you're only going to run windows inside of it, then it doesn't make a lot of sense unless you have a specific need for it to be virtualized.

xxx

lalan45 would be useful to install Proxmox on my desktop PC and run my daily driver OS inside a virtual machine.

You can archive this with any desktop/workstation Linux.

Fedora (very upstream)
Debian (stable 'old')

Gnome Boxes being the easiest solution
https://wiki.debian.org/SystemVirtualization#Virtual_machines
https://apps.gnome.org/Boxes/

Have fun. ;-)

W1zardK1ng

lalan45 just use QubesOS.

tux_

No, it's not worth it and not what it is intended for. If you want to virtualize an OS for one reason or another, why not do it directly on your main OS? On Linux you have QEMU and VirtualBox; the latter also runs on Windows but I would never suggest using anything made by Microsoft nowadays.

Proxmox is typically used on a server to separate resources and systems, but even for such a use case in a typical home setup it's not really worth it when more effective solutions like containers exist.

graphny

I'm not sure if you know about Proxmox, but you need two systems to use it. I have Proxmox running on an old laptop, and I access it from my PC via a browser. It's a web based OS mainly designed for running on headless servers aka servers without a graphical user interface.
And as others said, it’s not worth it if you’re just going to use Windows. Trust me, you either need to know your way around Linux or have a lot of free time to troubleshoot any problems that come up, and you definitely will run into some.

TrustExecutor

Try Incus on top of a lightweight OS such as Alpine. If you want something slick and modern without legacy stuff, you can try Chimera Linux and then run Incus on top of that.

With Incus you can run all kinds of OSes with just a few easy commands. It's image based and downloads popular distros as either LXC containers or full QEMU VMs. You can even convert Docker (OCI) containers to LXC containers and run it without any regular OCI container runtime.