I’m surprised no one’s mentioned Incus, it’s a hypervisor like Proxmox but it’s designed to install onto Debian no prob. Does VMs and containers just like Proxmox, and snapshots too. The web UI is essential, you add a repo for it.

Proxmox isn’t reliable if you’re not paying them, the free people are the test people - and a bit back there was a bad update they pushed that broke shit. If I’d have updated before they pulled it, I’d have been hosed.

Basically you want a device that you don’t have to worry about updates, because updates are good for security. And Proxmox ain’t that.

On top of their custom kernel and stuff, it’s just less eyes than, say, the kernel Debian ships. Proxmox isn’t worth the lock-in and brittleness for just making VMs.

So to summarize, Debian and Incus installed. BTRFS if you’re happy with 1 drive or 2 RAID 1 drives. BTRFS gets scrubbing and bitrot detection (protection with RAID 1). ZFS for more drives. Toss on Cockpit too.

If you want less hands-on, do to OpenMediaVault. No room for Proxmox in my view, esp. for no clustering.

Also the iGPU on the 6600K likely is good enough for whatever transcoding you’d do (esp. if it’s rare and 1080p, it’ll do 4k no prob and multiple streams at once). The Nvidia card is just wasting power.