I run proxmox for my own homelab and another instance for very small services inside my LAN.

Anyway, I have gotten into docker recently and my method so far has been to spin up a LXC container of just a base OS(like Ubuntu or Alpine or whatever) and then install docker and whatever else inside that container and then run my service.

So I have one container per service. Now my problem is how to manage the docker side without having to go into each container individually. I have tried portainer but it’s not clicking with me.

I’ve actually been trying to find a solution to just have docker on a bare metal OS install and that be my hypervisor, but I can’t get a clear answer on anything, so Proxmox seems to be my only option.

Proxmox is a very solid option, but it is not “less intensive” than Debian since it is built on top of Debian. Proxmox does not install a desktop environment(it has a web GUI), so that may help with keeping resources low, but it isn’t some magical solution.

I would recommend trying it 100%, there is a little bit of a learning curve getting to know Proxmox, but it’s the best hypervisor I’ve used for homelab so far.