Proxmox is available free. You pay for support and maybe other things with a license, but you can download it and give it a spin at no cost. I just switched to Proxmox around 1m ago when I restarted my homelab project after years on hiatus. I used to use Esxi before Broadcom bought VMware and decided to suck. I like it so far.

It might be overkill for your needs. I’m running it because I want to play with setting up and managing Win Server (I only have experience managing existing servers on Win), so there’s a distinct reason for me to be on Proxmox even though I’m a Mac and Linux person. I agree that it might be overkill for your i5 if you only plan to run one Ubuntu instance on it. However, a lot of homelabbing is about having an environment to try out and learn new skills. If that’s something that’s interesting to you, it might be worthwhile.

Keep in mind that you could also run KVM for virtualization if you find reason for VMs. You’re not limited to Proxmox. And if you see no need for VMs, you already have three devices to do the things you bought them to do.

Try following some of the advice in this thread. Hardware tests if the BIOS supports it. Maybe try underclocking or undervolting the CPU is BIOS supports that. If you can pull a RAM chip and test with just one, then test the chips individually in each slot, that’d be something worth trying. I’m shooting from the hip, but these are things that could help isolate a possible hardware issue.

Dominance?! Ha!

Why does this feel like it’s a flat-earth slide? I haven’t looked at any flat-earth propaganda, but I strongly suspect that it looks a lot like this.

That said, I’ll stick with my VMs regardless. I like simplicity.

Used to have a Linux homelab. Finally got Windows experience at a job for some years before moving to my current role at another org. Built a new homelab that’s organized around Windows Server because I’ve spent years managing it but never set it up from scratch. Learning small pitfalls of doing so. Just got VMs on the Win domain the other day; will be focusing on certificates shortly. It’s probably not that interesting to most, but it’s valuable learning for me. I’ll start trying to break in with Kali and similar tools once the infra is all setup.

Hopefully they’re really good at bringing money into the company, because their ability to save labor money for the company is abysmal.

I was asked to drive 80m to reboot a device when I’d said the previous day that rebooting would fix it (it was a phone; there’s almost no real troubleshooting on the platform). I kept quiet about how financially irresponsible the request was. When I got there, the phone was already turned off for other reasons. At least I got to listen to podcasts while I drove there and back.

Wow. It’s so easy to get that info from a web search that I’d argue that the response is evidence of the person not doing their job. Good on your wife for calling bullshit and the same for the higher ups who defended her position.

Insightful. I was commenting about a VIP wrt a power dialog on a mobile device and posited that the reason they didn’t understand a thing must be that they don’t read before dismissing it. I would even say that’s half of 1% of their attention and that makes complete sense. The other 99.5% is focused on the things they consider more important.

Had someone verify that wifi was working because he could see his neighbors’ networks. Airplane Mode was enabled. Dunno what he thought he saw.

Same thing with a colleague. The guy told him that he was definitely connected to wifi. It took a lot of probing to confirm that wasn’t true.

Some people just can’t provide valid feedback nor follow simple instructions. I kinda feel like those individuals shouldn’t be allowed to use computers to do their jobs. If you can’t master just pass the basics, sorry. Here’s a pencil and a pad of paper. You can either work the longer way or you can consciously put in the effort to learn this stuff enough for us to help you when you need it.

My own father, who had a doctorate in mechanical engineering: “Now click the Apple menu.” “What’s that?” “It’s the menu that’s an Apple logo in the top left corner of the screen.” “I don’t have that.” “Yes, you definitely have that.” “No, I don’… oh there it is.”

I’m not calling anyone stupid. More that I’m saying people convince themselves that they can’t learn and then shut down.

We’re at the end-times for western capitalism, where rent-seeking has become the primary driver of markets. It’s happening all around us.

Nice layout, at least at a glance.

I thought we were well past this topic. I guess everything old is new again. In fact, I’ll dust off a classic:

“Bugs fly through open Windows.”

It runs much faster now.

And that’s how I decided to install Debian as my next Linux VM (just got back into VMs in the past week with Proxmox). We’ll see how it does replacing my former favorite, CentOS, now that IBM / Red Shat have borked things up on that end.

Alyssa Rosenzweig is a badass low-lever coder. I believe she’s been responsible for a huge amount of the video driver work for Asahi. What an ass-kicker.

I think those reporting success running Linux on old hw should state the distro and window manager that they’re using if they want to provide useful feedback. I’m not in that group, but Tiny Linux comes to mind. Possibly Alpine? Probably better info to be had from daily-drivers.

Looks nice from the screenshot. Very clean.

I gave up on them a long time ago. I came to realize that anything that I bookmarked never got reopened once the internet turned into a bunch of data silos. Now I store everything I might want to see again in Pocket. On the rare occasion that I need to find something again, I find it via another RIL app called ReadKit, as Pocket doesn’t search the entire archive but only what’s been pre-loaded / cached from scrolling the list. ReadKit searches everything. I like the Pocket service, but fuck the client app search.

Yes, you should look for hand-holding tutorials. I don’t mean that to slight you. The first time I installed Linux was way before the internet was fast or full of easy to access info and way before most had access to a secondary device (like a phone) when hitting a roadblock.

It booted to a text prompt. I had no idea how to login (probably root / root or root / password or root / [blank], but htf would I know that?) so I erased and reverted back.

The point is, if you have very little experience, there’re tons of resources to help you out. Search them out. Lean on folks here for help when needed. You’ll be ok.

And the reason for my mention of sarcasm proves necessary. I can’t contribute code, so I contribute money to FOSS projects. And I think it’s stupid to dehumanize people. I haven’t embarrassed myself because you aren’t able to properly interpret my post building atop prior sarcasm.

There’s a reason I’m on the SDF instance and it wasn’t an accident. Learn to internet.