There are a few reasons why someone might use Proxmox. It doesn’t have to be just security, it can also be different network architectures that don’t work as well in Docker and it can also be just greater control over the services which is less comfortable to do in Docker as it’s meant to have built images that are running and are ephemeral. There are also certain services that either don’t have a pre-built docker and someone might not want to bother with making their own docker infrastructure around it or have technologies that are not well supported or are not well executed in docker.

There is also the fact that Proxmox is meant to be used in production, which means that it’s more stable (than some casual docker rubning on whatever distro they have) and it does have a very low overhead, even if you do use dockers you can use them within Proxmox and it gives you a lot of capabilities that add to stability and manageability.

Generally speaking if your threat model is very small, you’re running this within your private network, and it’s not exposed to the internet or anything large like that, then it doesn’t really make a big difference and you should probably just use whatever is comfortable for you.

I personally moved to Proxmox for three reasons which are security, customizability and stability. I felt that within Docker containers it was a lot more annoying to have to pull the images and make my own Docker files and update them and build them every time. I find it easier to have my own server with its dedicated service and that I know how to update and how to modify more properly and that I built from scratch. There is also the advantage that I can use whatever OS I want for different situations. Of course I personally use exclusively Linux but even within that I can use different distros and I can have all kinds of different services running without interfering with one another in any way, and in extreme cases I can have a windows vm.

And another major factor for me was that I just wanted to learn how to do it. I think it’s cool and it was interesting and I have already experienced Docker to a level that I felt comfortable with it and it was time to move on and expand my horizons.