some people think it's not "homelabbing" unless you're doing things the way it's done at large scale. i think these people are aiming to enter IT as a career and consider a homelab to be a resume project.
but proxmox and kubernetes are overkill, imo, for most homelab setups. setting them up is a good learning experience but not necessarily an appropriate architecture for maintaining a few mini PCs in a closet long term.
you can ignore the gatekeeping.
Homelabbing is a hobby for most people involved in it, and like other hobbies, some people dip their toes in it while others go diving in the deep end. But would you say it’s “overkill” for a hobbyist fisher to have multiple fishing poles? Or for a hobbyist painter to try multiple sets of paintbrushes? Or a hobbyist programmer to know multiple programming languages?
There’s a lot of overlap between “I run a server to store my photos” and “I run a bunch of servers for fun”, which has resulted in annoying gatekeeping (or reverse gatekeeping) where people tell each other they are “doing it wrong”, but on Reddit at least it’s somewhat being self-organized into r/selfhosted and r/homelab, respectively.
> i think these people are aiming to enter IT as a career and consider a homelab to be a resume project.
It's funny. I did this (before it really became a more mainstream hobby, this was early 00s), but now that I work in ops I barely even want to touch a computer after work.
k8s is definitely an overkill if your goal is not learning k8s.
proxmox is great, though. It's worth running it even if you treat it as nothing more than a BMC.
I'm running an ubuntu server as a hypervisor only because the proxmox installer is using an older kernel than the actual system and wouldn't install on my box :/