This is probably the one for me, really digging the level of customization and it’s easy to navigate.

Thanks everyone for the comments so far, I’m including 3 screenshots of how a post looks in all 3 locations (Memmy, Photon & Arctic)

I think Arctic is the winner for me, I like the layout and settings. Also Memmy removed the swipe from left to access subscribed communities and it’s been impossible to get out of the habit, Arctic seems to do it!

Thank you for answering my questions, I spent some time over the weekend performing testing. Sadly I suspect all my problems stem from my NIC failing. The loss of IP that I was seeing in OMV is still happening in Proxmox. Now trying to decide next steps, I can either keep throwing money at it and get an external Ethernet solution with compatible drivers or finally put this Mini to rest. I’ll probably make a post on the selfhosting community and see if anyone has any recommendations for hardware. Little peeved I bought the RAM and have this SSD with nowhere to make use of them. Maybe I can find a suitable machine that can use them, but I’m gonna guess they’ve aged out of the CPUs I’d need for better performance. But I am very happy with the Proxmox, LXC and Debian suggestions.

Hey CurbsTickle

Thank you so much for the tips, with a mix of googling, bit of GPT4 and straight smashing my head against the desk, I’ve gotten Proxmox installed on the Mac Mini and ordered 16GB of RAM (figured it’s worth the $40). Fought a serious battle trying to get to the startup manager with my mechanical keyboard and Dell monitor, eventually got it to boot from the thumb drive and install. I’ve got an LXC setup with Debian 12 and installed Plex, even managed to get my existing Plex Media folder from my external drive mounted in the container!

Next steps are the IVPN Wireguard killswitch VPN LXC and Transmission LXC, based on the quick reading I’ve done, it looks like iptables rules is the way to go. I’ll more than likely be writing a big post in selfhosted lemmy soon asking if anyone has achieved this already and has the steps. I might look at the *arrs but that is a later project, I am fine with searching, downloading and renaming/moving the files when I want to watch something. We don’t have regular shows we download right now.

Final questions before I head into the deep dark world of home server communities.

• Doing the Plex setup quickly, I gave it 1 core and 1GB of RAM, gonna guess this isn’t enough, if I’m doing Direct Play and transcode for subtitles, how much RAM and how many Cores would you throw at it with my system?
• Can this be updated or do I need to create a whole new lxc container if I want to add more cores/ram to it?
• For my HD 4000, is it of any use to me with Plex, or is it already being utilized due to it being integrated?
• Can I setup a SMB share from the mounted disk in Proxmox? I created a mount point in Proxmox and then edited the containers config file so it mounted in the container.
• Any final tips on MUST DO setup on the Proxmox side? Happy to nuke a container and recreate it if need be, but I’d like to make sure the Proxmox side of the house is in a good place from day 1!

Thanks again

This is incredibly helpful CurbsTickle!

Sorry this is probably a super dumb DNS questions, should I be setting my OMV DNS to the IVPN DNS or just my Transmission/OVPN Docker stack? I tried using the OpenVPN DNS here and it doesn’t connect when set in the stack, OMV or both. I also have PiHole on a Pi (maybe I can move that to Proxmox and use 1 system?), which is why I was using the Google Public DNS in OMV and the Haugene stack which seemed to work, apart from the weird issue I’m seeing randomly.

Honestly, I might scrap this configuration and put the time into getting Proxmox setup on this machine, try to get it in a good working order and then look at a tiny/mini/micro for later down the line. I’ve started watching more Anime and honestly the subtitle transcoding worries me a bit!

Any personal preferences or suggestions on hardware outside of the beelink s12pro which I’m checking out? I’m also hoping to cannibalize the SSD which isn’t that old, the RAM might be useless at this point.

Also any guides/tutorials you can suggest for getting a working Proxmox setup running similar to yours?

You are right, no discrete, I was confusing it with an older MBP (“Core i7” 2.8 15" Early 2013) I have. I might have a look at Proxmox, I like the idea of being able to segment the networks a little easier in a VM. I might need to go back to the Haugene documentation, I think they suggest public DNS, but I can try IVPNs DNS. Honestly does it make more sense to buy a NAS (Synology) and run Docker/Plex off that? If I drop the $ on some nice drives and RAM, would that be easier to manage and perform better? I’d like to not worry with 4K content on my home Apple TV and be able to have some people remotely connect if they wanted. Also tempted to use the Mac Mini for VPN/Transmission, then setup a cron rsync to my Mac Studio and use that for Plex.