Hi, I read your update and you’re just a little behind me on the trail, so here’s some breadcrumbs.

Proxmox is awesome, stop wondering and install it, it’s awesome.

Ok so you can do 2 things, VM or LXC. You’re wondering what the difference is.

VM is a computer

LXC is a container.

Now as far as I can tell a container is kinda like a little computer that’s made to do one thing. So it needs less resources, just what it needs to do that one thing. It also needs less permissions to do that one thing, so it has less permissions.

Now Docker is a container engine. It’s beautiful because you can just tell it what to make and it’ll make it. If you remember what you told it, you can do it again really quickly.

Docker is also beautiful because it will run on anything. So you can make a container on a Linux machine, then make it again on a Windows machine if you remember what you told it. This is done with a bunch of text, so as long as you can save that text and get it on another machine, well you have the container again.

Not knowing this, I’ve been trying to make docker work in LXC containers with a bit of success and a lot of failure. I thought I could just have a bunch of cloned LXC containers with Docker on, and make a bunch of services using minimal resources.

But now I know I’m trying to run a container inside a container and that’s why I’m hitting walls.

So Proxmox VMs are gonna be your friend. It will be tempting to try and migrate to containers, but as a beginner you can save a lot of headaches by making a couple of VMs and cramming a bunch of stuff on em.

This is where Docker is useful. If you use a docker hypervisor (?) app, there’s Portainer for example which I use, you can just use one instance to control a bunch of other instances of Docker.

This makes it easy to try something out on a test machine, then just move it over to another machine when it’s ready. The more similar the machines are, the easier the transfer. In Proxmox you can clone things, so you can make a computer, clone it, then set things up on one and move em over when they’re working right, then just turn the test machine off.

So in my opinion, boot a VM of Home Assistant OS and get that working. Make another for playing with of whichever flavour you fancy. Windows, Linux, both?

Bang docker in it and have a play. I like Portainer, made Docker easier to mess with, but I like a UI. So I got Portainer working first and used that to put Docker Compose files into “Stacks” in Portainer and poked them.

Then when I found stuff I liked I tried booting them so they work, be that in a VM, and LXC or in Docker if I had got it working to my liking already. Because Docker is containers I hit a lot of problems running stuff (and I don’t know what I’m doing) but found an LXC or VM easier.

Try getting piHole (and try Adguard, I prefer it) going in Docker. I found Adguard works perfectly fine in Docker, so once I got it working I just had to decide where I wanted it and ended up having an instance in Docker in an LXC (container in a container, not great, but it works.

Then I copied it onto a raspberry pi, just put Docker on it and and used the same file. That means that if I knackered up my Proxmox my internet won’t go down.

Hope that helps