In Proxmox they have VirGL-GPU and Virtio-GPU. They allow VMs to pass work to the GPU without being dedicated to one VM. I don’t think gaming was the intended use case and don’t know what kind of performance you would get. My uninformed guess is that it would not be great.

Just use Debian. Why use the inferior downstream distros when you can go right to the OG? You are already halfway there.

Debian doesn’t have a corporate sponsor so there is no risk of getting spammed or giving someone your personal information.

Maybe something I should look into again.

Yes! I’ve used that before.

I spun up a trial version of Windows Server and tried to get it working. It seemed to want a Domain environment and I didn’t want to go down that road. There probably is a way to do it without setting up a Domain but I didn’t feel like messing with it at the time.

I have a Windows VM on my server. If I need MS Office or any Windows-only program I just use Remmina to RDP in and get stuff done.

Windows has pretty good touch support over RDP so I can even do this from my phone or tablet if I need a full desktop on the go (using a VPN).

I bet manpower costs are significant as well. How many people are needed to run this thing? You probably need engineers with an esoteric set of skills to put it back together and manage it which would not be cheap.

Edit: I looked it up, it is running SUSE Enterprise Linux, so maybe management isn’t as specialized as I expected.

Check out these guys: https://www.linuxserver.io/

https://hub.docker.com/u/linuxserver

They have a pretty good catalog of pre-built Docker containers. You don’t have to use their version of things but there is a lot of software that I was previously unaware of that I learned of through them.

Never used that tool so I can’t really say :(

I think there are two options personally.

1. The Windows 11 LTSC version just leaked on Chinese forums. I wouldn’t use that ISO but would wait for the official release. Seems like the “best” version of Windows.

2. Use Chris Titus’ WinUtil on a normal install: https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil. He has put a lot of effort into this tool and it works great.

If you want to go full try-hard you can do it yourself. Buy NTLite and go to town on stripping stuff out. You’ll probably break something but it is fun to play with.

For some reason my DNS tends to break the most. I have to reinstall my Pi-hole semi-regularly.

NixOS plus Docker is my preferred setup for hosting applications. Sometime it is a pain to get running but once it does it tends to run. If a container doesn’t work, restart it. If the OS doesn’t work, roll it back.

Does it increase your attack surface? Yes. With proper precautions is this level of risk negligible? Also yes.

You will be opening a port to the outside world. Anyone can try to use it. But if you are using key authentication it will be fine.

Yeah I think the distro is less important. Really it’s choosing a lightweight DE + web browser will determine if a machine that old will work.

Check out Looking Glass.

https://looking-glass.io/

Why not just run TrueNAS Scale? It’s a NAS built on top of Debian?

I’ve been with Porkbun for over a year now. No complaints.

My GPU is quite literally 15 or 16 years old (I pulled it out of an old server that was being trashed). If you aren’t going to do heavy graphical work and just want to spruce up your desktop performance then really anything is probably fine.

I think both these options require downloading additional libraries on your Proxmox host to work.

Cat tax paid.

Under hardware > display there is an option for VirtiO-GPU and VirGL-GPU. I’m not super knowledgeable but I think these options allows VMs to make system calls to the GPU. I put an ancient Quadro in my server and my RDP sessions were noticeably better.

Setup a virtual desktop on your server and RDP into it to access the web interface. Here is me doing that using my cat as a stand lol.

If I had to guess it got damaged when transported in a box with hundreds of pounds of old servers stacked on top of it. Some of the other KVMs I saw were in pieces.